National Day of Atonement
By Marc Alan Di Martino
Scream at the empty mirror of the sky,
the waiting blue, the blinding cosmic eye,
until your pain lathes the Plutonian rim
of the Solar System.
Scream at the crystal ceiling of the sky
until it cracks up like an electoral map
of the United States, our jagged earthly cry
a collective bootstrap.
Marc Alan Di Martino is a poet, translator and teacher whose work has been published in Rattle, Verse-Virtual, The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and the Journal of Italian Translation, among others. His interview with award-winning translator and poet Michael Palma was published in Faithful In My Fashion (Chelsea House, 2016).
He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Perugia, Italy, where he works as a teacher of the English language and is an avid skateboarder.
Photo credit: Kenneth J. Gill via a Creative Commons license.