Posts for June 3, 2020 (page 7)

Imagine knowing your name
may be reserved for a space on a protestor’s sign:

Maybe those whose names we say
now are among The Better Angels,
or maybe they are who
became The Better Angels,
the once-amongst-us now greeted and sheltered
by impossible winged ones who
welcome each other to some unspeakable hall
of honor in the heavens.

I am only now learning the way to speak of The Better Angels,
hope to herald their change and
also think of the families, friends, communities…
It isn’t about me, still that “I” I worked to use sparingly in high school love letters.

The list
of the names of people of color deserves
more than a monument because
our country– their country–
owes them the building of our wealth and national
treasures, credit woefully past due to care and protect
and treat them as humans and better

than most of us

treat ourselves.

At an untold heavenly altitude, I believe The Better Angels
fear no barriers and all of us can see we all can finally breathe.

i wish i had the courage
to prance from rock
to rock, right to the cliff’s edge.
to climb a tree, barefoot,
without any purpose, but
an urge–
childlike in innocence, hope, and wonder.
to simply watch you want
to do these things
is a wonder and a blessing
in itself.

the future haunts me
like the past,
as i imagine myself
surrounded by people,
feasting on my incurable loneliness–
begging to understand
the deep, raw complexity
of our existances

and i nod,
pretending to know the answers

The street cleaner moves along the circle
where we live now behind a manicured lawn
in a brick townhome – the first brick anything
we’ve owned. You have no doubt

assumed that we are white — and you would be
correct, though at least a few of our neighbors
(African-, Chinese-, Pakistani-American)
might flinch at that assumption.

Stiff metal bristles twirl, slow, slow,
beneath the cleaner truck, scraping up 
mostly a lack of dirt. It is quiet
on this street. Sunlight quiet among trees

in a small park across the way.  Not like our first
apartment, hard against asphalt, against the “inner”
city where kids traded pills, and worse, outside our door.
Before that my husband grew up in a five-room house

clean and modest, asbestos-shingled, his mother’s
beauty parlor in the back. None of our parents
had running water, growing up in rural houses–
at least at first. You see where I’m headed here:

we are part of how things worked well–
for some of us. For a while.  
The product of the GI bill for him 
(after Vietnam) and for my dad, post WWII.

We live on a street bought with their sacrifice,
bought with the lives of the ones (black and white
and otherwise) who didn’t make it back.
It’s not enough, not what they fought to make,

until we learn that no one’s safe unless all of us are.
And though the loudest sound at morning here
is birdsong in air clear, at least for now,
of bullets, tear gas, acrid smoke, and even rain,

the fire that needed to be lit burns closer.

Black lives matter!
What’s that you say?
“All lives matter”?
Why did you need to respond with that?

Here’s a tip:
If you can’t resist responding with that,
Be sure to add the word “equally.”
Otherwise, you’ll sound like Napoleon in ANIMAL FARM.

Plane.
Car.
Ship. 
Bus.
These are all sighns of transportation.
Meaning they take you
from one place to another if they succeed.

They can take you from hot to cold to just right.

They can take you from a Volcano to Iceland to the cool and warm of the beach
and to  the swifftness of the Ocean.

It’s three competing chants at once:

an exhalation of grief
from over-burdened lungs;

personified theme
of narratives ignored;

condensed, 
cacophonous
love.

Essential giant
wants to keep us safe.
Site leaders send out the texts,
there’s been an additional confirmed case of the disease.
The affected individual was last on site
__/__/____.

Among conveyor belts and pallet jacks,
those of us still here
look around for missing faces.
Who is suddenly gone?
There’s always been a transience to the labor
but now every disappearance could be…
it.

Arrows on the floor
and walkways drawn in tape
guide us into distance as best they can,
people go the long way around
just to get out of the way,
breaking minds visible in that second, never-asked question
of what’s the best way to get around you?
Distance shortens the gap between mind and worry.

This is the deadliest, most power
natural force we’ve encountered in our lives,
crippling our whole world
and I may be standing
where it was breathing
a week ago.

Any day
I can carry it
home
with me,
a truth
we all feel.

And all we can do is take our precautions:
wash our hands and wear a mask,
shower when we get home,
maybe pray
or whatever your equivalent to prayer may be.
There’s no telling
when this crucible will end
but it will, someday.
Until then,
please,
be safe my friends.

(after Dara Horn)

I listen to the man’s rambling voice
and recognize, as if from my own
memories, the arches, the columns,
the alcove for the Torah scrolls, the water
in the ritual bath. It is like hearing someone
recount the elaborate details of a dream
in which I meet a beloved dead relative.

The past is alive, trembling within
the present; we are always walking on the dead.
It is difficult these days not to sense
an encroaching darkness. I lean toward
those glowing sparks, looking for more light.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/diarna-jewish-sites-not-seen-generations-visit-from-home-180974875/

fork – create a child

creates by duplicating.
The new is referred to as the child.

The child and the parent run in separate memory spaces.
have the same content

mappings and unmappings performed by one do not affect the other.

The child is an exact duplicate of the parent except for the following:

* The child has its own unique ID

* The child does not inherit its parent’s memory

* resource utilizations are reset to zero in the child.

* The child’s set of pending signals is initially empty

* The child does not inherit adjustments from its parent

* The child does not inherit locks from its parent
(On the other hand, it does inherit description.)

* The child does not inherit timers

The parent and child also differ with respect to the following specific attributes:

* The child does not inherit change notifications from its parent

* the child does not receive a signal when its parent terminates.

Note the following further points:

The child is created. The entire virtual space of the parent is replicated in the child, including the states, condition variables, and other objects; the use may be helpful for dealing with problems that this can cause.

On success, the child is returned in the parent
On failure, no child is created.

There are a number of limits that may trigger this error

An attempt was made to create a child