Inheritance

My hands are worn of work, and

holding an aching memory of

yesterday’s efforts to plant a

tree that will live five hundred years.

I was thinking it would be

eleven or twelve generations from now,

a child homegrown of my roots

might look to see some splendid legacy still

yearning into earth, still reaching for the sky,

having once been pulled from a bucket and

placed in the ground by hands

aching to turn the world around.