He had to say a poem. Others before him
Got up and said their poems. Some of them
Remembered everything they were supposed to,
And some of them cried when they couldn’t get the words
Right with their lips as stiff as Popsicles.

One of them didn’t say anything, just stood there
And stared at his mother on the edge of her pew
Nodding and staring back, and one nice girl
Told about flowers and looked like one and smiled,
Making her hands go up and down like petals

And butterflies, and everyone murmured
And whispered how nice she was. Then his own mother
Led him by the hand up the three steps
And let him go by himself on the flat part
To the middle place where he was supposed to turn

And face the people. He was supposed to say
The poem he’d been told in his left ear
At bedtime for a week. It said he was sitting
Down on a bumpy log, being as grumpy
As he could be, while a little bullfrog

Called from a bog. Cheer up! Cheer up! and sounded
So funny, the boy in the poem had to laugh.
And he was supposed to laugh, but he wouldn’t do it.
He’d seen a frog and a bog, had sat on a log,
But frogs didn’t sound funny, and though he remembered

Everything he was supposed to say to these people,
He didn’t want to say it. His mother was looking
Sad and his father inside his Sunday suit
Was turning red, and just when they all thought
He wasn’t going to say it, he said it

Loudly in a slow sarcastic singsong
And they never asked him to recite another.