My daughter captured a gigantic bug.
In time-honored fashion of huntress youth
she brought it to me in a mayo jar,
thrust the imprisoned bug up at my nose,
shouting her triumph in ruddy-faced glee:
"Check him out, Mama, isn't he UGLY?!"
Despite disgust I couldn't help but look
and saw she'd caught a huge carpenter bee,
fat, black, what the kids call a "flying grape";
how she'd trapped it I couldn't bear to think.
I asked her what she planned to do with that
mean buzzing trophy of her derring-do;
she looked at me with great indignation,
"Well I am going to KEEP him of course!"
Then looking closer into the glass jail
I saw that in its efforts to escape
the frenzied insect was wrecking itself,
with snapped antennae and a dragging leg;
beating, beating, beating against the glass,
willing to die, if necessary, to be free.

And I know that feeling... I do, I do.

So though I knew my daughter would hate me,
I took her outside and we let the bug go.

LW