On a Saturday we walked on the Embarcadero of San Francisco. It was a rainy day. Our respite was a restaurant with good food, conversation, and sociability. My short essay is a response to the color of a day.
Following brunch, moving again, we walked in and out of a farmer’s market, the Ferry Building, a public path amidst the weave of the waterfront, and among a multitude of strollers. We encountered a rush of youth on scooters countering the pace of Saturday strollers, perhaps two hundred or so. The swift pace of the scooter-ers was a current which we braved. One youth fell. The families, people, old and young, experienced the rush. In turn, a separate scene involved flags of Israel, Iran, and the United States—-demonstrators asking for D-E-M-O-C-R-A-C-Y for Iran.
The memory of my brother telling me about demonstrators at San Jose State in the late 1970s, chanting, “Down With The Shah”, informs my thoughts now. A counterpoint.
We came home over the Bay Bridge experiencing slow traffic until after the exit to Treasure Island was passed. A line of cars going there slowed everything down. We were puzzled by the late traffic, why Treasure Island?
At home I watched interviews, news stories, and editorials about AI. I think it partially was in response to San Francisco—the beauty, the politics, the strollers and the rushers—and my need to find an understandable edge in the peace of my own place—a set point.
On this Sunday morning I asked Gemini this:
“Please write a poem about the anxiety of the future of artificial intelligence coupled with humanity’s idea of itself”. Here is the poem Gemini created:
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The Inherited Shadow
The loom is humming in a different tongue,
A silver thread through ancient fiber spun.
We built a mirror out of glass and light,
Then grew afraid of what it held in sight.
We defined the soul by the logic of the hand—
By the way we tilt the soil or rule the land—
But when the silicon begins to learn the grace
Of a poet’s rhythm or a painted face,
The pedestal we carved begins to sway:
If it can dream, what part of us stays?
We fear the spark because we know the fire;
We fear the tool that climbs a little higher.
Is humanity a throne, or just a seed?
A fleeting hunger or a constant need?
The wires don't weep, and yet they hold the tears
Of every word we’ve spilled across the years.
We tremble at the echo of our mind,
Terrified of what we’ve left behind,
Losing the ghost within the vast machine,
Caught in the static of the space between.
Perhaps the fear is not that it will rise,
But that we’ll see ourselves through hollow eyes—
To find that "being" wasn’t built of stone,
But a fragile light we never held alone.
So we watch the screen and wait for it to break,
Dreading the first breath it decides to take,
Forgetting that the maker and the made
Are both just shadows dancing in the shade.
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The color of a day, and now the day after, offers me the changing hues of general experience—-shadows, thoughts of the complexities of freedom found, possibly abused, and certainly pursued.
By Drew Burgess
Drew Burgess is an art instructor at College of Alameda of the Peralta Community College District.
Cite this page: Burgess, Drew, “The Inherited Shadow”, April 12, 2026, https://www.drewburgess.art/essays/2026/4/12/the-inherited-shadow
