Category: Poetry — 21 posts
The Moon is the promise of the Sun
Fear not, tomorrow will come
Just look at its
Astonished face
Locked in place
To think
It cannot look away
Not once
Forgive us…
Some things
Are unspeakable
Even in reflection
I bathed in moonbeams last night
Showered in its fulgent light
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AI generated image
My son
One day you’ll learn
That love’s a kind of grief
Delayed
A journey with
The ferryman
Who must be paid
You’ll learn to hold
Love’s razor
Sharp blade
Just know
Each cut
Lets out
Your tender heart
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[code] Are Large Language Models anti-poets? [/code]
If great craft in poetry was predicated on plausibility, LLMs would outshine most humans. However, to be better at poetry, LLMs would need to be programmed with rewards for useful unusualness - for finding unlikely pathways across the linguistic landscape. They would need to understand the value of friction, the feeling a poet gets when something unresolved works its way through and out of the subconscious demanding attention and exploration.
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I tried to sklent
to see if you
were enjoying Joep
as much as I
the Dutch poet
at the pulpit
(in his sanctuary)
striking looking
like an
Old Testament
prophet
I heard the keys
gentle Goliath
struck
to unlock
the magic wooden box
and the sounds drifted up
t’wards heaven
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Defeated again
By a shy
Unwritten verse
Trapped in the space
Where hurt vibrates
And vibrations hurt
Another song
Abandoned
A failure of words?
And all those lines
That might have been read
Left inside, unsaid
AI generated image
Poem and AI song & video
Audio version (my voice)
We Are Dawn
Shy moon
Hiding with
Dwining stars
Slow sun
Sauntering o’er
Weald and tor
Green land
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Breathing loam
Seeding sky
Experimental AI album
I also tried my hand at an AI generated album ‘The Silence Inside’: a mixture of some of my poetry and instrumental music all using similar prompts to give the whole thing a (hopefully) coherent sound. Unfortunately AI can not yet produce studio quality tracks.
Listen With or Without Prejudice
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10 poems about Israel and Palestine1
AI ‘art’ – The desert night is full of longing
“Whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary. Go learn. "
― Hillel the Elder, Talmud, Shabbath 31a (Judaism’s Golden Rule)
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Another morning
I awake and shake
My tired head
Warm the old
Cold coffee
That’s when the panic hits me
‘My God!, you lunatic!
What have you done?
Look what you wrote!
Do you remember what you said?
You imagined it all! ‘
A dreadful waking fever dream
Curse these amygdalan frenzies
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A fearful people
Can do such terrible things
They are so easily tempted
Frightened into
Wagering with Satan
And guaranteed
Damnation
The people of Canaan
(To appease
Great powers
Or avoid defeat)
Sacrificed
Their most innocent
Some say to Yahweh
A dreadful gift
No din of drums
Could ever drown
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Read by the author
They’ll try
To cut
The threads
That bind us
To freeze
The love that flows
Between us
So they can
Segregate or
Imprison us
They’ll try
To quell
Our ‘slave’ rebellion
They aim
To kill
Simple compassion
To make
Each heart
Cold tomb
And catacomb
Made ready
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These ’translations’ were made relying on a number of sources including AI translations and, in respect of ‘It Is Possible’, relying heavily on Robert Bly’s translation which he named ‘Pushing Through’. The author does not speak German, so interpretations might be a more accurate description.
It is possible I am trying to push through solid rock lying in
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“Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still”(T.S. Eliot)
I told my sad story to the wind and, brutal wind,
It would not listen to a single word.
So I sung to the cold cruel sea,
But it shrugged off my song in the toss of a wave,
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poem for a wedding
Write me a poem about being together…
One wonders when to rhyme it with weather
Or whether to say
Weathering the storms altogether
And yet like relationships
The best lines of a poem
Are not made to be a perfect fit
In poetry & life we must aim
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Shall I regurgitate those tired old tropes?
Barbary apes, Rule Britannia
Mottled Utrechtian paper
With the keen eye of a British expatriate
For the bleeding obvious
Yet, when I see Gibraltar my heart swells
Not just with
Tales of past victories, sieges endured,
Ramparts withstanding, bastions defended
Or something half remembered
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Palpitating
Shiver of sea
Sparkling splinter of
Numinous ocean
Gifted personality
The Great Green
Divested of all terror
Its playfulness distilled to
Living livery of wave
I return new-born
With Dawn’s
Rose fingered bloom
To find you
Hoping you will
Humour me
(It is you who decides
whether we shall meet
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“ Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? ” (John Keats)
A little piece of Heaven
Fallen to the Earth
Lightness made
Heavy
In the
Transubstantiation
Of birth
Kindled from the
Darkness
Sung into being
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In memory of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Today I see the god
In everything
And everything to me
Proclaims and sings
And dances
Like the dragonflies
In spring
Gentle reminder
That the flame
Is not the fire
Love every host
And every ghost
That lives within
Little escaped their minute attentions and predations:
The Soul, an early casualty
Of more precise instrumentation
Senescence, just another
Dragon to be slayed
The mysteries gave way
To complex refutation
AI generated image
Too few paused
To wonder whether
Ever quicker
Computation
Would unleash the
Ancient iron law
Of more is less
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’ I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves. The branches, and the wind, and the rain. I don’t know what’s happening anymore.’ - Anthony (‘The Father’)
Struggling wordlessly into the light
Startling eruption of limb
As green as green has ever been
Flowing and fumblingly growing
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