You state in your bioblock that you don't like having your writing criticized. I'm not sure what I'm doing here, in that case, since critiques are my stock in trade. I'm certain that there are plenty of people in your life who would be more concerned with your emotional well-being than with your literary prowess; any of them would be glad to give you a non-judgemental assessment of your work. But that's not me.

That being said, there is much here to like. Too often, what is passed off as poetry these days turns out to be, on closer inspection, prose hacked up into uneven lines, filled with some sentimental observations and directions to the reader on how they're supposed to respond, and that's it. Such cannot be said of this piece. Were you to eliminate the line breaks and turn your words into paragraphs and sentences, you would end up with an unsatisfying piece of prose. This is a good thing, just what you would expect from writing that seeks to claim a different space than what is commonly occupied by prose.

You use sharp images and strong verbs. The few times you fall back on adverbs and adjectives, a simple rewrite would find most to be unnecessary. Your nouns and verbs are getting the job done nicely.

I wonder who you're reading. It's not immediately obvious from a quick scan of the current crop of literary magazines out there, but writing such as yours still has a valued place in the field: poems that strive to be about a topic, that state their meanings in unambiguous lines and that embrace the real world. One has to be diligent in their search to uncover such examples, but they are numerous. https://www.strongverse.org is a wonderful place to find like-minded writers turning out, well... strong verse. You should check them out.

All of which is prelude to my main point: your writing isn't as strong as it could be, should be and deserves to be. Despite what I said about you understanding the distinction between poetry and prose, you need to recognize that at this poem's core beats a heart of prose. Consider: prose is the vehicle most suited to explanations, descriptions, narrations, arguments, rebuttals and all manner of expositions on this or that subject. The one common thread linking all prose pieces is that they exist in the service of something external to the words themselves. All the recognized elements of prose: paragraphs, sentences, phrases, clauses, punctuation, scenes, chapters, stories, novels, scripts... everything exists to establish a support structure that will enable to true purpose of the writing to come through to the audience undiluted. You have a point to make, a purpose to achieve, and, once that point has been made and the purpose achieved, your job is done. It is the subject that defines the writing.

Poetry, on the other hand, is all the other stuff. None of the elements of poetry—scansion, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, consonance, lines, line-breaks, alliteration, to say nothing of the vast quantity of forms that have evolved—none are concerned with subject. This is not to say that poems can not, or should not be about something, only that the poem's subject won't, on its own, make the poem memorable. It is language itself that is the poem's first priority, language that dances, that takes surprising shortcuts, that shows off what it can do when cut free of the need to adhere to a cause-and-effect prose logic.

This is your poem's weakness, and why I say it comes with a prose core. It is clearly about something; conveying the sequential events is the poem's primary purpose; once you've narrated the events, you are done. Truth is, there's a killer short story here, but, as you say that you don't like writing long pieces, consider what poems are able to do that prose cannot.

It has been said that poems should never be about what they are about. In other words, subject is fine, on the surface, but if you don't exploit that surface as a jumping off point for some further exploration, you've wasted the poem's potential.

Here's an example that I've often referred to to make this point. "The Air Field"  is a poem that begins, as does yours, in an immediate present, using descriptions of actual events to carry the poem forward. But note how, in the second stanza, the perspective shifts, moving away from the events themselves into a recollection of them as part of child memories, finding a more complex interpretation of what was going on. By the time we reach stanza 3, we've left the memories of childhood behind and are now firmly in the realm of politics, world history and the deeper implications of state policy, all accomplished without ever actually state such topic outright. The poem manages to accomplish, in a few brief, terse lines, what would have taken an entire essay in prose to approximate, and that would have been without the bite and emotional impact of the poem.

This is what poetry can do, effortlessly, and prose cannot. There is more to be said in this poem; what, I couldn't say. It's not my poem. But I think you could uncover deeper dimensions in your topic material, and the result would be much stronger for the effort.