My dad threw me a bag,
and only when I was holding
the weighty smooth sureness,
of that contained pebble, he said:
It had been removed
from a young girl’s skull,
post-mortem, it was
noted, the cause of death,
after being shot up
from its settled place,
on a wide roadside verge,
by a spinning mower blade.
Never intended to kill,
that bullet-bit remnant,
water course washed,
a history left to geology,
but now removed by blades,
from the land, and the lain,
cut from a rough bank,
and then cut from her brain.