Today’s subject line is from Camille T. Dungy’s “When I Die, I Hope They Talk About Me,” which was published a week after the death of George Bush, which was announced on World AIDS Day, a coincidence not lost on those of us still bitter about how people with AIDS were (mis)treated during his reign. It was a relief to see that I wasn’t the only person digging deep below the fold:

There is, we learned, as we all must learn,

always an even worse man willing to take

the job. I didn’t even know that guy

had a daughter. When he was breathing

all I ever heard was son, son, son. But now

his little girl is headline news, and I have to dig deep

below the fold to find stories about how

he turned his back on boys who were quilting

America’s cities in gay enclaves.

A poem I (and several church associates) need to spend more time with is Langston Hughes’s “Freedom’s Plow,” which the chamber choir performed yesterday. The arrangement contains only a small section of the poem — mainly the lines in the Harper’s excerpt, which outside of full context can sound really rah-rah (the full poem is a doozy — I tried summarizing it on the fly after-while scrolling through my phone mid-discussion Wednesday, but the gist was “I’m sorry, y’all, this is huge, you gotta read it, yourselves), and a bass singer pretty much said, “I’ll sing this, but it’s BS” after we read through the piece a few days ago. After an intense discussion during the rehearsal, one of the altos who is also a worship associate drafted a statement on behalf of the choir that was reviewed by several other members and read by our senior pastor before we sang the anthem. You can hear both the statement and the song (starts at 9:15) on the recording of the service.