Two girls,

Sisters,

Playing on a moonscape,

Of mortar craters and defiled buildings.

Schools are crumbling into the desert.

Derelict houses lie soulless and abandoned.

The bullet-holed corner shop no longer sells Cheetos

And colored sweets,

Amid the sand and concrete grey.

Two girls,

Sisters,

We do not scoop them up

From the shadows,

Instead, we feed them to war,

Shell by shell, round after round.

We patrol our shores,

For water-bloated overboard babies.

We turn away into "Oh dears" and "What a pity"

Two girls,

Sisters,

Seek out shelter from the missiles

Their comet tails foreseeing their end,

Blazing trails across the sky,

Catching the eyes of the camera footage,

As they fall in their lottery randomness,

Spilling collateral blood among the damaged

And still, the wanton chaos has not finished.

Two girls.

Sisters.

They are always running along,

The edges of the creeping dawn,

Trying to escape the darkness.

Still, the sun rises, bleaching away the night

Revealing body-soaked bullets, drying on the ground.

With nothing but shrapnel and landmines for toys,

They know their world has eclipsed them.