Ralph, I like the feel and flow of this—nice formal discipline. Like Bill, I did suspect that the poem related to the current Mideast crisis. But similarly to Roger, I feel unconfident about some of the details. They’re so compressed and governed by rhyme that it would be hard to make them quite clear in this form, I think, unless it were extended a bit. To me, the repeated phrase “kids in sand” evoked the innocence of children playing in sandboxes as contrasted with very different, sinister, adult-governed, experiences tied to sand. It doesn’t sound like you had this in mind, but I think it’s a neat effect that might even be interesting to explore more.
Also, I don’t see grammatically what “to” is doing there in the second to last line. Is it supposed to be the children doing the mocking, and if so, why?
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