Someone handed me a gun and I hid it in a closet.

                        A millennium ago, a canon was made to fit in a fist.

Bamboo packed with powder in a hunt for immortality.

            And then, in our time, a man—from a country Godless

and cold that gave this easy weapon a name—shot

more people than any one on earth. The word gun means

war not survival, is rooted in a feminine name that repeats:

                        war war like an echo, a ringing in the ear. In the armed forces,

soldiers are told to name their rifles, to love them, own them.

            The worst shooting in America for sixteen years was at the Luby’s

in Killeen, Texas. He hated women. One of his victims wanted

more guns after he felled both her parents and failed to end her.

Man has always found a way to kill himself, turn a weed flower

                        into a gun instead of a crown. My mother first lived in a shotgun

house: all the bedrooms on one side of the building, safely tucked

            away. The story was you could get a clean line from one end

to the other—front door to back—a bullet entering the home

without obstacle.