As a legislator in my state
I drew up my first law to say
that citizens could never vote again
after they had passed away.
My fellow members faced the troubling issue
bravely, locked in hard debate
on whether, after someone's death had come,
three years should be adequate
to let the family, recollecting him,
determine how a loved one may
have cast a vote if he had only lived
to see the later voting day.
My own neighbors warned me I had gone
too far in changing what we had always done.
I lost the next campaign, and failed to carry
a single precinct with a cemetery.
Jimmy Carter, Always a Reckoning and Other Poems, (Crown Publishers, 1995)
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