Poem Renaissance – Marc Alan Di Martino

Gyroscope Review is celebrating National Poetry Month with a Poem Renaissance, a review of previously published poems looking for new life and new views. Every day through May 20^th, a new poem to fall in love with all over again.

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by Marc Alan Di Martino

My mother always insisted that when a person dies
a library dies with them. Just think of all that knowledge,
she’d muse, locked in a person’s attic! I’d picture her
bookshelves sagging under the heft of those Heritage
Club volumes in our paneled rec room: Droll Stories,
The Brothers Karamazov with its terrifying woodcuts
by Fritz Eichenberg, Tono Bungay, Sherlock Holmes,
Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. The shelves snaked stealthily
around our basement where a tang of mildew permeated
the claustrophobic air. I took a few to New York
when I left, sold them eventually for cash or credit
knowing one day they'd come back to haunt my life.

My mother’s point, of course, was that each individual life
is as complex and intricate as any library, bound up and gagged
by all those folios. Whose memories aren’t tethered to ink
in some fashion? Books feather the ensorcelled mind,
prepare it for the dullness of facts, the day-to-day crush
of routine. What, I wonder, perishes when a bookshop
closes its doors? She is no longer alive to field that
question. Only Wonton is left, a black-and-white tabby
on a vacated floor, unwitting guardian of a world
that vanished the instant the key turned in the lock.

The poem was first published in the (Now defunct) Hollins Critic.

Marc Alan Di Martino’s books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell'Arco (World Poetry, 2024 - translator), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski's Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, iamb, Palette Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

Don’t forget to read the Spring 2025 Issue, available now, online and in print

Previous Renaissance Poets

April Poets

May Poets