Playing with AI & Poetry

This poem by Joyce Kilmer came to mind.  It led to the prompt to the AI and the result…  I then edited the hell out of it. Leading to a little poem ‘I see a rose’

Trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
___________________________________________________________
Write a simple poem about poetry using nature as a metaphor.

A rose by the side of the road
Is all it takes to make me feel whole
All the colors and scents
Nature has to offer
Take me away to a place where I can be free
And the world is my oyster

This is what poetry does for me
It takes me away to a better place
And fills me with hope and beauty
When I am surrounded by nature
I feel at peace, and everything makes perfect sense

Thank you, dear poet, for giving me this gift
For opening my eyes and my heart
And transport me to a world of your own

Where the only thing that matters
Are the words that we write
And the feelings they inspire

 

I see a rose

I see a rose
& I feel whole.

Your words invite
my heart to open,
thank you.

See Saw Jig Saw Words

Found this poem on my computer. Wrote it a few years ago.

 

In fever
I’ve been
a machine
all night

See saw
jig saw words
tumble
& fall
to make an image
as they land
on sand

Truth is that
beauty
never sleeps
alone

Beauty lies
under a cloud
in darkness
rarely seen

Truth and love
live
side by side
with romance
out of sight

While you’re
asleep
we’re awake
& see the dream’s
a joke

We left the
car & caravan
in the
flooding stream

Retuned to
find a
baby on a horse

She looked
at us with
knowing
eyes

we played
our games
online
so lost
we could not find
the tokens
for the
times

wild and precious life

Mary Oliver (Wikipedia)

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

~

The Kingfisher
Mary Oliver

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world–so long as you don’t mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your
whole life
that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the
water
remains water–hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could
believe.
I don’t say he’s right. Neither
do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the
silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and
easy cry
I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

Wide brown land

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror �
The wide brown land for me!

We had to say this at school in the fifties – over and over and the imprinting sticks. I love the place. Went there recently for the Psychodrama Conference in Brisbane, spent a week in northern NSW, driving around, camping, the poem kept rolling through my head, especially when there were floods or sweeping pains. I saw plenty of both while there.

Poem – The Journey – Mary Oliver

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu