Page 8 - Demo

1
“Deep Learning”
Dear AI, I would like a photograph in which
a mother holding her infant before a painting of a smoky battlefield looks across a gallery
at a soldier in combat fatigues before a painting of a haloed mother holding her haloed infant who is looking back at her but does not smile.
Then tell me what innocence and courage are
from the evidence of the scene you’ve conjured. Fast forward to a cell phone video from yesterday of a wooden cart piled high with human remains; torso, legs and feet, unrecognizable flesh, a hand. Turn the sound up, tell me what that wailing means. What is a child? What are all the things a child was? And what are the things the child will not be now? What is a mother? Can you answer these questions?
Then tell me what innocence and courage are.
What does the soldier before the painting think? Does he see only haloes? And in the video, a boy, all eight fingers in his mouth, rocking in the dust, can you divine what has taken root in his mind? You, sum total of our understandings, tell me what new ways to think and feel we will have to learn,
then tell me what innocence and courage are.
Note: A recent invention, the Bop was created by Afaa Michael Weaver during a Cave Canem summer retreat. Not unlike the Shakespearean sonnet, the Bop is a form of poetic argument consisting of three stanzas, each followed by a repeated line, or refrain, and each undertaking a different purpose in the poem’s argument. The first stanza (six lines) states the problem, and the sec- ond stanza (eight lines) explores or expands upon it. If there is a resolution, the third stanza (six lines) finds it. If a substantive resolution cannot be made, then the final stanza documents the attempt and failure to succeed.
RichaRd hoffman