This week’s poem, Dennis Camire’s “Atop Peaked Mountain,” brings the scale and wonder of the cosmos to the granite and organisms right underfoot. I love this poem’s Zen-like simplicity yet sense of vastness, and its reminder of how much there is to revere all around us.

A professor of writing at Central Maine Community College and an AWP Intro Journal Award winner, Camire has published poems in Poetry East, Spoon River Review, Mid-American Review and other national publications. In 2017, Deerbrook Editions published his first book, “Combed by Crows.”

Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers, LGBTQ writers, and other underrepresented voices. You’ll find a link to submit in the credits below.

Atop Peaked Mountain
By Dennis Camire

I’ve so come to admire the lichen
Colonizing the barren rock planets
And making them fertile for moss
Then blueberries inside crevices
That, in the last light, I gaze back
and forth between the first stars
and these galaxies in granite
I’ve overlooked my whole life.

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. “Atop Peaked Mountain,” copyright 2022 by Dennis Camire, appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.