This week’s poem, Dennis Camire’s “First Loon,” conjures a remarkably delicate and intricate natural soundscape. I love how this poem immerses us in the most sensitive, searching acts of listening and – eventually – of hearing anew.

A professor of writing at Central Maine Community College and an Association of Writers & Writing Programs Intro Journal Award winner, Camire has published poems in Poetry East, Spoon River Review, Mid-American Review and other national publications. His latest book, An Anthology of Awe and Wonder, is forthcoming in 2024 from Deerbrook Editions.

First Loon
By Dennis Camire

Listening for the
first loon’s tremolos
I hear every cricket
play its cello of wings
And each moth softly
tap the tambourine
Of its body
against porch light
While the breeze
maracas last year’s
Hung-on beech leaves–
so it’s okay to feel
I’m being put on hold
so long by mother nature
then to realize I’d
forgotten what I was
waiting for when
the call finally
arrived

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “First Loon,” copyright 2023, by Dennis Camire, is forthcoming in An Anthology of Awe and Wonder (Deerbrook Editions, 2024). It appears by permission of the author.