Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right. <br />The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange <br />was featured as merciful, quick at the bone <br />and the case we had against them was airtight, <br />both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone, <br />but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range. <br /> <br />Next morning they turned up again, no worse <br />for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes <br />and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch. <br />They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course <br />and then took over the vegetable patch <br />nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots. <br /> <br />The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling <br />to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses. <br />I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace <br />puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing, <br />now drew a bead on the little woodchuck's face. <br />He died down in the everbearing roses. <br /> <br />Ten minutes later I dropped the mother.She <br />flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth <br />still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard. <br />Another baby next.O one-two-three <br />the murderer inside me rose up hard, <br />the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith. <br /> <br />There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps <br />me cocked and ready day after day after day. <br />All night I hunt his humped-up form.I dream <br />I sight along the barrel in my sleep. <br />If only they'd all consented to die unseen <br />gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.<br /><br />Maxine Kumin<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/woodchucks/
