Natasha Jervis Poet Free verse

I went to school

My five-year-old wrote:
Today I went to school.

We sit so long
we wet ourselves if we forget.
We are tested to read,
to obey,
to survive silence.

Dragged from bed by scared parents,
faces pressed into coats,
eyes half-asleep,
small bodies hauled to obey.
Exhausted, feverish,
falling asleep on the walk home.

The “village” is gone.
Mothers work.
Mothers clean.
Mothers breathe in the halls of the school
that slowly kills us.
Work, chores, survival—outsourced
to the institution that measures life in lessons,
marks, and obedience.

Every day, a machine.
Curiosity flattened.
Joy stolen.
Bodies trained.
Minds caged.
The cycle of work, of consumption, of obedience,
designed to trap us,
to keep the brainwashing alive.

We are alive.
We are here.
Even as the system tries to vanish us.

One day, the world will wake.
We will see the cages we lived in.
The system that called itself education,
but was really slow, quiet abuse.
The great child abuse scandal of this century.

And we will ask ourselves,
whatever role we played—
teacher, parent, policymaker, bystander—
why did we comply?

We will remember:
children wetting themselves,
children falling asleep on the walk home,
children dragged from beds before the sun could rise,
children forced to learn,
children always ill,
children always exhausted,
trapped in a world designed to crush life,
to flatten joy,
to cage curiosity,
to train obedience.

We went to school.
We survived.
We remember.
We will not forget.

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