gaza's children (100-word proem)

Here's another 100-word proem, this time from Neil Howell. It's good to have a political offering, and Neil manages to avoid either sentimentalising the situation from afar, or patronising the people suffering so badly in the occupied territories.

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Gaza’s Children

Dribbling slow flow of thought, heartless in Gaza where the wellspring of armistice blood seeps from the hundred year aneurysm of sovereign divide. To the victors the spoils but beware the spoils of war, ground-glass shards, the shadow-lurking wraiths that scour revenge through time. Age does not wither them floating through eternal night on owl-soft wings of memory; patient, biding, hunting, pouncing in lethal silence, leaving the echoing screech of war to fade over blasted poppy-fields. There the opiate of complacency, dung-fertile ground for ripened seeds watered by ancestral tears, nurtures the blood-red blooms, the petalled souls of Gaza's children.

© Neil Howell