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The grasshopper struggles between my fingers
and my young sister squeals –
She’s the one who asked me
To bait her fishing pole
in the first place.
I take the squirming thing
and feel my insides writhe with compassion –
or is that my breakfast trying to escape?
I force the struggler onto Sister’s hook,
watch yellow-green-blue blood leak out
as my stomach turns.
What an ignominious way to die.

I think most of us wish that the orange “Cheez Bait” we’d brought had worked.
But it didn’t, and you, poor grasshopper, are to pay for it.
Down you go to your watery grave.

I don’t even really like fish.
I agree with Bill Watterson, or Calvin, or whoever it was – Why would we want to eat something
That had just eaten a bug?
But I am not to argue;
“When you’re with the team,” my father always says,
“You eat what the team eats.”
And the team is out here fishing in the clear water
in the canyon where the sky gleams blue
with the scent of sagebrush and of a world a little less organized than the one I normally know.
And so I will continue to hunt grasshoppers
and introduce them to the business end of my hook.

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