gospel

PLEASE DON'T POISON ME
(words: Brother Michael Rosenthal; music: traditional)

refrain:
Don't poison,
don't poison,
don't poison poison poison,
please don't poison me.
Don't poison,
don't poison,
don't poison poison poison,
please, don't you poison me.

verse:
Don't put arsenic in my jelly,
cause it really hurts my belly,
don't poison, don't poison me.
(repeat)

(refrain)

Don't fill my jujubes with antifreeze,
cause it makes me wobbly in the knees,
don't poison, don't poison me.
(repeat)

(refrain)

Don't put cyanide in my latte,
cause it makes my skin all spotty,
don't poison, don't poison me.
(repeat)

(refrain)

Don't stick my cranium with uranium,
it might make me go insanium,
don't poison, don't poison me.
(repeat)

(refrain)

Spare me from formaldehyde,
from homicide and suicide.
Don't poison, please don't poison me.

(refrain)

________________________________
Gospel music every Sunday morning
from 8-10am, WKCR 89.9FM.

Vernon Hunter, RIP

OK, before I turn to the important task of telling you what's wrong with the two photographs I posted below, here's some words about Vernon Hunter, who was killed when Joseph Andrew Stack completed his suicide mission.

Community mourns loss of victim in plane crash
By Bobby Longoria

Staff, Daily Texan Online (University of Texas at Austin daily newspaper)
Published: Monday, February 22, 2010

It was dark inside the Greater Mount Zion Baptist Church on Sunday morning. Members of the congregation locked hands and bowed their heads to pray for their friend, Vernon Hunter, who died Thursday when preliminary suspect Joseph Andrew Stack flew his plane into the federal building where Hunter worked.
Hunter was 68 years old, but friends and family say his vitality and happiness suggested a much younger man. Hunter, an Internal Revenue Services employee for more than 20 years, and his wife Valerie worked at the building located near the intersection of Research and MoPac boulevards. During Sunday’s services, members of Hunter’s East Austin church remembered him as a loving husband, father of three, stepfather of three and grandfather of seven.
“He was a gracious man, just an outstanding soul,” said Gaylon Clark, lead pastor of the church.
Hunter volunteered at the church’s food and clothing pantry and assisted church members with preparing their income taxes. He served two tours in Vietnam and was described as the life of his community.
[break]
Hunter’s family and members of the church said they harbor no ill will toward Stack or his family[....] church deacon Larry McDonald said. “We know Vernon would want us to move on and go on with our lives and be kind to people and giving to people. That’s the way he was.”
[break]
Funeral services for Hunter will be held Friday at the St. James Missionary Baptist Church, and he will be buried with full military honors at the National Cemetery at Fort Hood. As the service ended, church members walked out into the sun bearing Hunter’s philosophy of kindness and love — for which he will always be remembered.
[full article]

It's curious, isn't it? A news search on Vernon Hunter turns up thousands of articles that are mainly about Stack. The article excerpted is the closest I could find to an obituary today. (I set up a news alert - I'll mention it if any/many others turn up.)
It makes me think of Crispus Attucks, generally considered the first victim of the British during the American Revolution, and, as Stevie Wonder reminds us, a black man, as was Mr. Hunter. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. made the bitter joke that students at a high school named after Attucks wore jackets that read "Innocent Bystander High." Will there be a high school named after Vernon Hunter? And what bitter joke might that inspire?
What will the monuments be for Joseph Stack?

Snow, Mary

I was puttering around the apartment this morning before work, paying attention only to plans and intentions, when I happened to turn toward the window. "Oh, it's snowing!" I said, in a tone of voice that wouldn't have been inappropriate for a five-year-old.
I've been at work in the grimmest and least spontaneous of offices and heard other grown-ups pipe up at the sight of snowflakes as they never had at any other occurrence. The word "pretty" is as likely to be uttered by taciturn machos as dedicated femmes.
Why this pure, this unadulterated, reaction to snow?
It certainly is a childhood thing. The parent's conveyance of excitement before a snow is a lesson in how to welcome something good from the world. The child has likely heard the word "pretty" applied to a birdy or a flower, but never before to anything as kinetic, as sensory, as enfolding as a snowfall.
A snowfall shows the air. Instead of an imperceptible something, the air is fluttering, depthy, stinging. Instead of the nothing of still air or the constancy of wind it invites the eye to move, here and near and far and near again. How bad can a falling be if it seems endlessly renewed?
In the vertical city, what your eye sees is flattened by habit and facade. You lose the opportunity to focus far. If there's not much in the way of trees around, you don't have the chance to follow motion, to look into depth.
A snowfall plumps the atmosphere, flirts with the eye, capers between you and the usual. It inverts the world, turning the ground brighter than the sky. It can't be bought or financed, canceled or rescheduled. Yay!
As long as you don't have to shovel it, snow is a pure pleasure for the city dweller. For a day or two if you're lucky. If any remains after that, the filth that accumulates on it is made even more vile by the reminding shine beneath. It's enough to make you growl and grow older.

[Note: The "Yay!" above is dedicated to Mary Susan Herczog.]