My schoolmate Julia hanged herself in her Phonix home July 2003. At work in the classroom, our case example is a woman who has been arrested 23 times in 3 years. Expensive computer recognition system can still identify the same human face from the first to the last mugshot. And i was told that bare human eyes have no way in telling it's the same person. We can not tell but we ask why, 23 times within 3 years for the poor soul? This is a poem i wrote in that context:
i looked at my son's pictures
his eyes squinting bathing in the golden sunlight
and another one with him kneeling
by a fireplace outside captain lounge
playing wood blocks
with a toy sword sticking in his back
how long will his bright smile last
the only sunshine by day and night
welling up happy tears from mother's eyes?
i was watching a TV program last night
about the trouble of our inner city boys
it is hard to take in many blows
it is even harder to figure it all out
what else he was suppose to do
to beg for tough love from a father
with whom the mother will not tolerate ?
the more i watched the more i feared
that this violence is more real than i can deal
At work, we're installing this new identix system
out of templates extracted from million mugshots
a search is being demonstrated
to find any possible matches
upon vector feature, local feature
combined with surface analysis
in no more than a few seconds
Technology is so advanced
and mothers like myself has been made to believe
that we are equal to face the world
except years of a mother's tenderness
holding up in a boy's life
has been diminished to scattered digital images
showing many angelic childish faces
terribly mismatches of what I saw
those 'presumably' innocent
faces stacked up under criminal suspicions
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