After Moving

In a room full of boxes, I am listening

to the rain falling on my roof for the first time.

It's March. Denver doesn't know

whether it wants to be spring. Or maybe

that's not the right way to say it.

Everywhere wants to be spring. Things bloom early

and hard frost drags the season back.

Here the birds start singing long before the sun

has shown any sliver of its arc. Here the birds are trying

to build a nest in a hole in the siding

above my back door. I chase them off,

but like shadows they wait

and return. It is impossible not to love them.

They are the color of roadside peaches.

---

ANDREW HEMMERT is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (Pitt Poetry Series) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines, including The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He won the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Contest. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and currently serves as a poetry editor for Driftwood Press.

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