By Ali Taha Alnobani
When an Old Poem Returns
A poem sometimes returns to its author years after it was written, carrying questions that have never lost their urgency.
In 2011, I wrote Rifle and Violin, a short anti-war poem about a musician suddenly thrown into the violence of battle. I published it on Write Out Loud in March 2013, at a time when I was exploring how poetry could express the fragile boundary between human tenderness and human destruction.
More than a decade later, in 2025, I returned to the poem with a different artistic possibility in mind: what if its story could be rewritten as a song?
The result was Rifle or Violin?, a musical reinterpretation that preserves the central conflict of the original poem while developing its emotional and dramatic possibilities.
This experience made me reconsider something fundamental about poetry: perhaps a poem is not always a finished destination. Sometimes it is the beginning of another artistic journey.
The Original Poem: A Musician Confronts War
Rifle and Violin emerged from a simple but disturbing imaginative situation.
A musician who once belonged to the world of orchestras, dancing, and love suddenly finds himself surrounded by helicopters, military violence, and fear.
The instrument he once held against his neck has been replaced by a rifle.
This transformation is at the emotional center of the poem. Two objects, similar in the way they are held close to the human body, represent opposite possibilities.
The violin produces music. The rifle produces destruction.
One invites expression; the other threatens silence.
The protagonist is not presented as a heroic warrior. He is a frightened human being struggling with a responsibility that has become almost unbearable.
Standing behind a tree, preparing to pull the trigger, he remembers his daughter, Julie.
Her imagined voice interrupts the machinery of war.
That moment changes the poem from a description of violence into a moral confrontation.
What matters is no longer merely whether the man will survive. What matters is whether he can preserve something of his humanity.
The poem ends with a question rather than an answer. The musician confronts the terrible uncertainty of the object in his hands.
Is it a rifle, or is it a violin?
The question is deliberately larger than the individual character. It asks what human beings choose to create when history places violence within their reach.
Read the original poem, published on Write Out Loud in 2013:
https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=34763
Returning to the Poem After More Than a Decade
When I revisited the poem in 2025, I did not want simply to reproduce its original words over a musical accompaniment.
The poem already possessed its own rhythm, dramatic structure, and emotional conclusion.
A song, however, creates different possibilities.
It can return repeatedly to a central question. It can develop a character’s memories across several verses. It can create emotional contrasts between quieter passages and more powerful musical sections.
I therefore began rewriting the poem as a new lyrical work.
The title changed from Rifle and Violin to Rifle or Violin?
This small alteration was significant.
The original title placed two objects beside each other. The new title brought the choice between them into sharper focus.
The question became the emotional center of the song.
What Changed in the Lyrics?
The original poem is brief and concentrated. Its dramatic movement takes place almost entirely within one moment of crisis.
In the musical adaptation, I expanded that moment into a more developed narrative.
The opening introduces the atmosphere of war through helicopters, fear, and the destruction of familiar places. The musician remembers the world of concert halls and performances, now replaced by suffering.
The relationship between his past and present becomes more explicit.
His hands once held a violin bow with confidence. Now they tremble in a landscape where music has been displaced by violence.
The song also gives Julie a stronger recurring presence.
In the original poem, her voice interrupts the father’s intention to fire.
In the musical version, her memory returns through the chorus, transforming an intimate family relationship into a repeated appeal against war.
This was particularly important to me.
I wanted the emotional argument of the song to emerge not from political declarations, but from the relationship between a father and his daughter.
War becomes horrifying not only because it destroys cities and bodies, but because it threatens the memories, affections, and relationships through which human life acquires meaning.
The musical adaptation also introduces a more explicit closing appeal for peace.
Yet the essential image remains unchanged: a musician forced to confront the difference between an instrument of art and an instrument of death.
Why the Violin Matters
The violin is more than a convenient symbol in this poem.
It requires a particular relationship between the human body and artistic expression.
The musician supports the instrument near his neck and guides the bow with a combination of discipline, sensitivity, and movement.
Playing the violin is an act of attention.
It depends upon listening, coordination, and the ability to transform physical movement into emotional meaning.
A rifle may also be held close to the body, but its purpose is radically different.
The contrast between the two objects therefore becomes a contrast between two forms of human action.
One creates a sound that another person may receive as beauty. The other can end that person’s ability to hear anything at all.
Of course, music does not automatically make human beings peaceful, and poetry cannot by itself stop a war.
I have never believed that artistic expression possesses such simple power.
But art can preserve questions that violence attempts to silence.
It can remind us that the human being standing behind a weapon may once have held something very different.
Julie: The Voice That Interrupts Violence
For me, Julie remains the emotional heart of both works.
She does not enter the narrative as a political figure or as an abstract symbol of innocence.
She enters as a daughter.
Her voice brings the musician back from the collective machinery of conflict to the intimate responsibilities of his own life.
The significance of this moment lies in its simplicity.
The father does not suddenly discover a philosophical argument against violence. He remembers someone he loves.
That memory becomes powerful enough to disturb his obedience to the circumstances surrounding him.
In rewriting the poem as a song, I wanted Julie’s presence to remain audible throughout the emotional development of the work.
The repeated chorus allows her memory to interrupt the narrative more than once.
Through repetition, what was originally one dramatic moment becomes an insistent moral appeal.
The father may be standing in a battlefield, but another world continues to exist inside him.
It is the world of music, family, affection, and remembered happiness.
From Written Poetry to Musical Interpretation
The song Rifle or Violin? was developed as an anti-war ballad with a cinematic atmosphere and a classical crossover character.
In creating the musical version, I used Suno AI as an AI-assisted music production tool, working from my adapted lyrics and creative concept.
The accompanying lyric video was developed through a combination of digital editing and AI-assisted visual tools.
These technologies offered a way to explore the dramatic atmosphere of the poem through musical and visual expression.
I consider it important to be transparent about their role.
The original poem, its characters, and its central symbolic conflict existed long before this musical adaptation. The rewritten lyrics and creative direction form part of my continuing literary work.
The technological tools provided a means of producing and presenting the musical interpretation.
The resulting song is not a recording of the original poem being read aloud. Nor is it an identical musical setting of the 2011 text.
It is a new work developed from an earlier poem.
Listen to the musical adaptation, Rifle or Violin? (2025):
Can Music Change the Meaning of a Poem?
This experience raises a question that interests me as both a poet and a songwriter.
Does a poem preserve its original identity when its language is rewritten for music?
In Rifle or Violin?, certain changes were necessary to create a song with verses, choruses, and musical transitions.
Some ideas became more explicit. Certain emotions gained greater emphasis through repetition. The narrative expanded beyond the compact structure of the original poem.
These changes inevitably affect how the work is experienced.
A reader encountering Rifle and Violin on the page may pause at the final question and imagine its silence.
A listener experiencing Rifle or Violin? hears that question return within a musical structure, shaped by rhythm and melodic development.
Neither experience needs to replace the other.
The written poem allows its readers to create their own inner performance. The song offers an additional interpretation, giving the words a different emotional environment.
What connects the two works is not their identical wording, but their shared imaginative center.
Both ask whether human beings can resist the transformation of beauty into violence.
Poetry, Technology, and the Human Imagination
My recent experiments with poetry and music have also led me to think about the relationship between artistic intention and technology.
New tools can make certain forms of creative production more accessible, but they do not eliminate the questions that writers must confront.
Why does a particular image matter?
What emotional experience should a work communicate?
Which elements of an earlier poem must remain, and which can change?
How can an adaptation become something more meaningful than a technical reproduction?
These are questions of artistic judgment.
For me, using AI-assisted music production has not diminished my interest in poetry. On the contrary, it has encouraged me to revisit older texts and examine their possibilities from another perspective.
A poem written in one period of my life may contain an image or a character that continues to invite interpretation many years later.
Returning to such a poem can reveal changes not only in the work, but also in the imagination of its author.
The Question That Remains
When I wrote Rifle and Violin in 2011, I was thinking about the human tragedy of war and the fragile place of music within a violent world.
When I transformed it into Rifle or Violin? in 2025, the question remained painfully relevant.
Wars continue. Families continue to lose those they love. Human beings are still asked to exchange the instruments of ordinary life for the instruments of destruction.
The poem could not prevent those tragedies, and neither can its musical adaptation.
Yet I believe that poetry has a responsibility to preserve the human questions that survive beyond particular events.
For this reason, I do not see the transformation of Rifle and Violin into Rifle or Violin? as the replacement of an old poem by a new song.
I see it as a continuation of a conversation that began many years ago.
The poem spoke through written language.
The song attempts to give that language another voice.
And behind both remains the same difficult choice between destruction and creation, between violence and beauty, between the rifle and the violin.
I would be interested to hear the thoughts of fellow poets on this experience.
When an original poem is rewritten as a song, with new verses, a recurring chorus, and a different emotional structure, does music deepen the poem’s meaning—or does it create an entirely new work?
Ali Taha Alnobani is a Jordanian poet, novelist, and songwriter. His literary and musical projects explore the relationship between poetry, storytelling, human dignity, and contemporary creative technologies.
