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In Search of a Psalm to Sing in Dark Times

Paul Mariani

What shall I say, Lord, now that the wordskeep stumbling, tumbling like loose marblesacross the table then down onto the floor,bouncing and scattering this way and that? What shall...

Word by Word

Paul Mariani

Before I formed you in the womb, my son,I knew you. Knew you long before that highspring day in the sixth year of the reignof FDR, when the full-leaved...

First Light Last

Paul Mariani

You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It...

The Wheel, The Wheel

Paul Mariani

Sixteen and a half with a brand new driver’slicense in my wallet, driving my father’s’47 two-toned old clunky Pontiac, I turnedleft off Hempstead Turnpike when a car swimsshark-like in...

Snow Moon Over Singer Island

Paul Mariani

Black velvet darkness, tufts of shredded clouds heading slow-ly up the coast, the lamp-like February snow moon the hostthe celebrant raises at the Consecration steady above the coast,transfiguring the...

Mitzvah

Paul Mariani

A Saturday night, late February. Eileen and mein the back of the cramped car, Julie driving,Bruce riding shotgun. We’re heading downto Amherst for an evening of Borscht Belt vaudeville,Fifty...

A Distant Purple

Paul Mariani

Mid-September, dear woman, and the monarchlights once more upon the purple panopliedbutterfly bush in the now-decaying garden,as it has for these past thirty Septembers. And once again, like the...

Pantoum ​for East Fifty-First

Paul Mariani

And then, in an instant, it’s gone: the world of East Fifty-First.Gone the round-the-clock clack of the Third Avenue El,the clutch-grinding rattle of Fords and the clop clopof those...

What’s in a Name?

Paul Mariani

A paralyzing gelid vortex of a January morning. He lay under the covers as the beckoning New Year’s sun began to manifest itself through the curtains of his bedroom...

They Shall Beat Their Swords…

Paul Mariani

With my father’s Army ballpeen hammer I’d found down in the cellar, I kept banging on the swordblade, trying to turn it back into a plowshare like the ones...

What the Father Came to See

Paul Mariani

How old the story is, we have come to see, and yet how true. The kid’s back home at last, knowing he’s lost everything the old man gave him,...

Regard the Scuttlebutt as True

Paul Mariani

In the hot Washington afternoon, in one of those endlessly bustling government offices, there sits a man named Michael J. Astrue, the fifty-four-year-old head of the Social Security Administration....