Bare Arbor

Their nest didn’t survive

the night that winds threw

lawn chairs against the fence,


so there would be no high-

pitched feed-me’s washing

over the arbor, seeping


into cracks between branches,

the way waves claim

a jetty’s every crevice.


Spring was vicious

that year toward nests

and nesters, so many wind-blown


birds. Try again, my mother said

and so, though spent, we let

a hot August seduce us.

---

---

W.J. Herbert’s debut collection, Dear Specimen (Beacon Press, 2021), was selected by Kwame Dawes as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series and awarded a 2022 Maine Book Award for Poetry. Winner of the 2022 Arts & Letters Rumi Prize for Poetry, Herbert’s work appears in The Atlantic, Best American Poetry 2017 & 2024, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.