Hobble Creek Oxbow

This broken tree
and the stream
and mud and weeds

around it--everything
about it is beat-up,
beat-down, scruffy

and accidental. Still,
the wan sun shines down
as weakly on it as on

any rising great palatial
forest, as if saying
there is no failure

or success in striving, only
being in the end, and then
in the beginning, again.