Seven Little Poems About Making Laws

1. Prayer by the chaplain:
   cloudy pleas, made to a god
   we keep nebulous.

2. Farmers’ Lobby Week:
   seed-hatted, they plow the halls
   sowing their concord.

3. Sulfite pages in
   the old casebooks
   flake to crumbs.
   So much for the past.

4. (Oh dear. There are now
   seven hundred sixty words
   in this subitem.)

5. Where white silk brocade
   covers the tall, formal walls,
   we cut food support.

6. Capitol Cafe:
   German proverbs, whitewashed since
   1917,

7. are restored to view
   with bright applause. Old hatreds
   have new objects now.