AI and Are poets about to become obsolete?

 There's a lot of talk about the inappropriate use of AI by students in education, less so about its use in the arts. But it's here and I, for one, will be very interested to see how editors and publishers deal with AI-generated scripts. 

I asked ChatGPT english and irish words for the mix of soil and dung in places regulalry trodden by cattle. After getting the list, it asked would I like it to give me a poem based on my request and using some of the words. Having given me its original poem, it said " Release it under your name or in a shared authorship format, depending on your use".

Bracais is irish for mire, pluda is soft pulped muck.

“Bracais”

There, where the gate sags,
and the trough leans under rain,
the ground is a churned remembering —
bracais of hoof and hunger,
a mire where clay and dung
no longer part ways.

Boots sink with knowing.
This is the old place,
the place beneath every threshold,
where soil and waste embrace
like labour and loss,
like birth and decay.

The cows do not mind.
They have shaped it with their weight —
slow, patient architecture
of pluda and presence.
Even filth, trodden long enough,
becomes home.

Gaza Bombing

 

From a clear blue sky

thunder,

bombs

and death

to man, woman

and child.

When it settles,

the dust is spread

over breakfast tables,

Tel Aviv to Washington;

the milk in our cereal

stained;

a grey powder

on our bread.

Holy Well

 A rewrite of a poem from 2019. I regularly return to the topic of holy wells; their magic, their timelessness. People have been offering prayers at wells for millennia, but, in modern times, there is a atmosphere of precariousness around them; in a way it adds to their specialness. Many have been neglected, forgotten, destroyed or, since drying up, have lost their following, but all, since their thread sews centuries together should be preserved and respected. 

Holy Well

The bottom of the well is a mosaic of wishes;

each one shining.

I have left my dream dancing in a tree,

a tree growing on solid rock.

Perhaps the dancers fall into the well;

perhaps their after-life is a gleam;

perhaps wishes become dreams;

perhaps our after-life is a dreaming.

Here the spring weaves itself into lush pasture;

where gods, immemorial, have changed

water to verdure,

perhaps this, indeed, is the place to sow a seed.