"Woodchucks" by Maxine Kumin

At first glance, I thought I was reading about a farmer failing at clearing out a rodent problem in one of his barns: “The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange” (line 2). Not much else appeared to be developing in the second stanza, although my suspicions were anxiously starting to mount (“Gassing” line 1, “cyanide” line 8). The “rebellion” faded quickly by the 3rd; my emotions were boiling, my senses on overload. Everything I read up to that point was aggressively confirmed, and as much as I hated what I was reading, I wanted to know if anyone got away.

The narrator describes the escalation of his methods (and emotions) in assisting his fellow Germans in the occupation efforts during the holocaust of WWII. The choice to use woodchucks, another word for groundhog, to symbolize the Jewish people carried an array of intense suggestions, not limited to the obvious (Jewish associations with pork, rodents, land-hogs, people referred to as animals).

But I can not think of a way that true hatred be more perfectly portrayed than in the description of the exhilaration one race feels toward the killing, even with bare hand, of another: “O one-two-three the murderer inside me rose up hard,” (line 23), “I dream I sing along the barrel in my sleep.” (line 27-8)

The power of this poem forced me to look into a single mind propelled by that era. Regardless of how I feel about the poem, I can not deny the emotion of its accuracy.