Here is a poem for day four of NaPoWriMo. You know where the prompt comes from by now.
The Cruelest Month
They sit in rows,
uniform,
hunched, sagging,
a hundred tiny scratching
nibs
deafening inside this velvet sweatbox.
Outside, the nursery across the street
rings its end-of-day bell
and spills
laughs and screams
into a street
busy and littered
with flickering,
birch-filtered sunbeams.
Back in the hall,
one hundred minds
try to
make sense of maths
problems filled with
esoteric exposition
and non-sequiturs.
In and of themselves,
each question is a grain
of sand but each
feels like an entire beach
dumped on to
hunched, sagging shoulders,
shoulders now aching,
cracking with the weight
of expectation,
to out-perform pushing parents
who know how little they achieved.