Subterranean prayers are the best prayers; the ones which for a thousand weary and silent weeks could not be spoken aloud, or even spoken of between the closest friends. They hang like a heavy stone around the neck, a bittersweet burden, hot like sauna rocks, a comfort which gives no ease. I picked up a prayer like that for you today, dear reader. My earnest prayer is for anyone who listens for the distant sound of singing on the wind; some of you can hear it better than others. Let him who can hear it listen.

Such a petition always has its answer: like an angry choir which shouts atonal challenge from the lofts of a lower cavity-cathedral, it cannot be unnoticed. Who could fail to hear it? How could the very corpses of the dead fail to echo back, if only to join in the singing? The skin of the listener prickles up startled and embarrassed.

And whose is this chthonian song which rises up against the stunned and ringing lithosphere? What tortured lyric could be drawn across the bullet-bones of all this shouting? What rough and ragged hide could cover up the sinews of the prophet rising up from brownian motes of mud and sticks and grass?

The prophet looks at his unwitting congregation –those who gathered here but did not come in by any doors– and turns, and turns, and looks, and looks. And finally he speaks, his gravelly voice cracking like granite at the boring holes:

The earth is the LORD’s and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.