This was the poetic challenge, last night, that I accepted sleepily before I went to bed:

Greetings, intrepid poets! De Jackson here, aka WhimsyGizmo. It’s Quadrille Monday (my favorite!), when we pen poems of exactly 44 words, including one word we here at dVerse provide. 

Today, let’s talk chalk.

So I did, remembering my 1980s-2000s Open University Science (and evening classes in wildlife gardening) at Tynemouth College, Tyne and Wear; King Edwards, Morpeth, Northumberland; Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge; Cottenham Village College on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens – and wondering how few or many pens hitched a lift home by mistook. Not 44, that’s for sure.

State School Stationery

short-term-contract adult-educator, pale-faced at the chalk-face

anxiously confronted with classroom full of white-boards

where must Never Use Permanent Marker,

NUMP, and please leave the erasable pens

for next teacher lest the Open

University get a bad name; the host

school ain’t charity after all

© Kathy Labrum McVittie 2022