Who do you pray to when
you don’t believe in God?
she asks.

And somehow, jaw tightening,
you bite down on the blurt—
Whom!—the correction sliding
down your throat like sweet cream,

for you are no longer in teacher mode,
and your spine straightens, your
wings tucking discreetly between
your shoulder blades.

You want to say that belief has little
to do with the existence—or lack thereof—
of the divine, that a prayer doesn’t have
to be uttered to anyone, anything,
in any direction, to be acted upon.

It will be taken in, you want to tell her,
by what can’t be seen, absorbed into air
with her exhale of gratitude, transmitted
through the tree in the front yard whose
leaves have brittled in ungodly heat
or vanished with the cold.

Even her unspoken help me soars up
to the crow in that tree, issuing his own
prayer for something tasty to appear.

The simplest plea—voiced or not—
is heard and answered, you want to tell her,
though you don’t because that would
give away the ending.

She does not realize that she is the prayer,
that she, all by herself, is the light-bringer,
the breeze, the tree that only looks dead,
the bird winging away.

The crow, you tell her, as if you know.
You talk to the crow.

And for now, at least, she nods in—
if not belief—something that rises,
that, for the moment,
feels like trust.