Trojan Poetry 53: "Frog-Hopping Gravestones" by Chen Chen

Useful Links:

Chen Chen Interview:https://youtu.be/zcEpHI-Wsag

Chen Chen reading: https://youtu.be/Z12amGb1lLw

Trojan Poetry is created by John Waite and Mike Melie, teachers at North High School in Downers Grove. Follow us on twitter @TrojanPoetrydgn.

Frog-Hopping Gravestones
 After Bert Hardy
The schoolboys in the cemetery look happily busy, playing what looks like the last
game of tag on earth—one in which the rules are reversed & almost all of them
get to be It. The photographer has caught them rushing between the gravestones,
a swarm of prim haircuts, tailored pants, & recently polished shoes now getting
sullied. This uniformed, many-armed It chases while one lone boy has scurried up
a tree, his arms & knees hugging tight the bark, the darkest part of the picture.

Or maybe this is the wrong song, the tree-climbing & graveyard-running unrelated,
the schoolboys forming separate scenes. For what to make of the boy, a bit older
perhaps, who’s just standing, staring at a gravestone? Does he recognize the name?
For what to make of the boy frog-hopping a gravestone? He’s the sole hopper, & yet
it’s his action that gives the photograph its name, gives this playground at the end
of the world its loudest life: one boy pushing off the top of a gravestone with both
hands, one boy’s legs kicking out, one boy flying, flinging himself in an impossible
direction, a future outside the photograph--