“We Have Always…” is John J. Trause‘s mysterious and musical poem from our Summer 2018 isssue.

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NAIL A BOOK ONTO A TREE
Memorize a word or three
Bury coins and golden watches,
Curios and witchy swatches.

Run around the yard and garden
Let your heart and feelings harden
Tidy up the little hollow
By the creek, both deep and shallow.

Put the sugar in the cupboard
Hide the watch behind the floorboard
Entertain the guests at tea
Memorize a word or three.

Store the books and don’t return them
Someday you will have to burn them
Memorize a word or three
Someday you’ll live merrily.

And remember, come September,
To be kind in May, November,
Even when the world’s an ember
And you are its only member.

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JOHN J. TRAUSE, Director of Oradell Public Library, is the author of six books of poetry and one of parody, Latter-Day Litany, the latter staged Off Broadway.  His translations, writing, and visual work appear internationally in many journals and anthologies, and Marymark Press has published his visual poetry and art as broadsides and sheets.  He is a founder of the W.C.W. Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, N.J., and the former host/curator of its reading series. For the sake of art Trause hung naked for one whole month in the summer of 2007 on the Art Wall of the Bowery Poetry Club.  He is fond of cunning acrostics and color-coded chiasmus.