“Artificial neurons can be trained to kill humans without humans overseeing”
I read on my iPhone, stopped at a red light, & next to my car
a child is playing a street piano fast, counting THREE, TWO, ONE,
yelling over traffic, I’m PLAYING, sun on the child’s face
& fingers skittering on keys—
neurons direct these fingers, a consciousness no one shares
that says, high notes now, then low, & laughter,
& an adult urges the child to come-on-let’s-go,
but the child plays a crescendo & says
I AM FINISHING MY SONG—
& artificial intelligence can use recurrent neural networks to create
piano music & AI can drive cars, but my eyes tire,
my eyes are animal eyes with animal need to gaze out
at red lights & be given the useless-lovely data of a sparrow skimming
to a telephone wire, a child at a rainbow-painted stringed instrument,
the sparrow hopping on a wire, the child pressing keys like a question:
low, high? Low, high? Perception a note not played again,
& when the light turns green my car drives,
I am finishing my song. The light is yellow now.
Copyright © 2026 by K. A. Hays. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 29, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“One day when I had stopped at a traffic light in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania, my iPhone interrupted with a Reuters or Associated Press notification banner. That snatch of ‘news’ became the beginning of a poem focused on the perceptions of my living intelligence in that instant. Here is my hope: that another living intelligence will read this ars poetica and, in a time dominated by the digital and artificial, attend to its own unrepeatable perceptions to create something original and strange. In this way, my living consciousness gives something to yours, across time. But the light is changing—the only time you have for that is now.”
—K. A. Hays
K. A. Hays
