A Tree

Making my way across this wide, open space
(behind me ... much the same as seems to lie ahead)
its emptiness, its barren neverendingness 
sucks out the marrow from dry bones that tumble
from the knapsack slung across one shoulder
drooping beneath the weight of expectation
accumulated in the course of life's dry river bed

meandering more as a memory of what it was
that might have been
than the possibility of what it is
that might yet be.
                              I find myself still looking up
from time to time, scanning the near distance
and the far horizon, for foolishly, against all evidence,
I still believe that there may be a tree; growing,

unexpectedly perhaps (against the odds for sure)
where once, some years before perhaps,
a seed slipped from the beak of some wandering bird
on the very day that rain fell on this parched land.
.