I just read about the shootings in Chicago over the 4th of July weekend.

I want to share something with you.

This isn’t a protest song. Or a political song. Or an anti- or pro- anything song.

It’s a song sung from the perspective of the bullet that killed a six-year old boy at his elementary school in Sandy Hook, CT one December morning.

And it’s the song I’m most grateful for having written.

This is ‘Bullet’:

BULLET
they took me from the fire
metal forged my skin
for what darker of desires
lay in the hearts of men
then they put me in a box
with others just like me
high upon a shelf
for all the world to see

i could have landed in a twelve point
under amber autumn sky
or in the old fallen willow
where paper targets die
but i don’t make those kind of choices
i have to go where i am sent
i never know where i am going
until i know where i went

he took the box down in secret
and left me in his room
underneath a glowing screen
where he drowned himself in doom
until he had enough one day
when he took me in his hand
and put me in a darker place
where i heard the hammer slam

i could have flown over the ocean
in an officer’s salute
or taken down your killer
before he had time to shoot
but i don’t make those kind of choices
i have to go where i am sent
i never know where i am going
until i know where i went

i flew closer
and closer
i flew closer
and closer
i flew closer

and closer and closer to you
but i didn’t mean to hurt you
i had to go where i was sent
i didn’t know where i was going
but now i know where i went

My two girls look different on just about every level. Big, small, blonde, brown, not even the same species. But underneath all of that they share something (besides me)… they’ve both been really hurt and have the emotional scars to show for it.

When Stella was a puppy she was attacked by a pit-ridgeback mix in a parking lot. The dog tore her up, and while she healed physically, she doesn’t allow most animals too close anymore. She doesn’t trust them.

And when Annie came into my world, she didn’t trust humans at all. What she could tell me through her behavior suggested that she’d been deeply dishonored somehow, but the only remaining physical signs were the white dime-sized remnants of scars on her belly where she’d been cinched up too tight and made to work.

I tell their stories (and mine) of finding trust again in the new book.

But this is what it looks like.