By Ali Taha Alnobani
What happens to a poem when its author returns to it more than a decade later, not simply to read or revise it, but to imagine it as a song?
In March 2013, I published several English poems here on Write Out Loud. Among them were The Strawberry Woman, Rifle and Violin, and Sofia’s Masterpiece Story. Each belonged to a different imaginative world, yet all three shared something essential: an attempt to express human experience through images, emotions, and symbolic storytelling.
In 2025, I returned to these poems with a new creative purpose. Using contemporary digital tools and AI-assisted music production, I began transforming them into songs.
The process involved more than adding melodies to existing words. I rewrote passages, developed new images, introduced choruses, and adjusted the language to create musical works that could stand independently while remaining connected to their poetic origins.
The result was three songs: Strawberry Light, Rifle or Violin?, and Bridges & Ghosts.
1. The Strawberry Woman: From Earthly Beauty to Cosmic Light
The original poem, The Strawberry Woman, explores beauty through images of the strawberry, the moon, the sun, paradise, fire, and ice.
When I revisited it, I became interested in expanding its imagery beyond the immediate world of the poem.
The resulting song, Strawberry Light, transforms the woman into an almost mythical presence, moving through a universe of stars, colors, celestial light, and impossible distances.
The imagery of fire and ice remains, but the musical version develops new lyrical movements and a recurring chorus.
The original poem is relatively compact, allowing its images to suggest meanings without fully explaining them. The song, by contrast, creates a more expansive emotional atmosphere through repetition, melodic structure, and newly written verses.
For me, this transformation demonstrates how a poetic image can remain recognizable even when the language surrounding it changes considerably.
Original poem — The Strawberry Woman (2013):
https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=34796
Musical reinterpretation — Strawberry Light (2025):
2. Rifle and Violin: When a Poem Against War Becomes a Ballad
Of the three adaptations, Rifle or Violin? remains especially close to the central dramatic conflict of its original poem.
Rifle and Violin tells the story of a musician caught in the violence of war. The instrument that once expressed love and beauty has been replaced by a weapon. His daughter, Julie, enters the poem through memory, reminding him of the humanity threatened by the conflict around him.
The original poem is brief, direct, and emotionally concentrated.
In rewriting it as a song, I wanted to develop its dramatic possibilities without losing its fundamental question: must a human being surrender the language of music to the language of violence?
The new version introduces additional scenes, a recurring chorus, and a more sustained confrontation between the rifle and the violin.
The song does not merely retell the original poem. It extends its argument through musical repetition and emotional development.
The violin becomes more than an instrument. It becomes a symbol of the possibility of choosing art, tenderness, and life over destruction.
Original poem — Rifle and Violin (2013):
https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=34763
Musical reinterpretation — Rifle or Violin? (2025):
3. Sofia’s Masterpiece Story: From Poetic Narrative to Bridges & Ghosts
Sofia’s Masterpiece Story presented a different challenge.
The original poem moves between characters and images connected by bridges, memory, unfinished journeys, and the uncertainty of reaching another destination.
Sofia and Sami inhabit a symbolic landscape in which crossing a bridge becomes an image of human existence.
In creating Bridges & Ghosts, I expanded this landscape into a darker and more atmospheric narrative.
Sofia becomes an artist working with mysterious light, while Sami confronts memories that seem to break beneath his feet.
The song introduces a recurring image of humanity endlessly crossing bridges, uncertain whether the journey will lead to discovery, loss, or disappearance.
The original poem’s suggestion of individual lives intersecting across symbolic spaces becomes a broader meditation on memory, guilt, identity, and mortality.
Its musical adaptation also inspired a surreal visual interpretation, in which bridges, shadows, and figures suspended between worlds reflect the emotional movement of the lyrics.
Here, poetry becomes not only song but also the foundation of a visual narrative.
Original poem — Sofia’s Masterpiece Story (2013):
https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=34762
Musical reinterpretation — Bridges & Ghosts (2025):
4. The Role of AI in My Musical Experiment
These adaptations also represent my exploration of the relationship between human creativity and emerging technologies.
I wrote and adapted the lyrics, developed the artistic concepts, and directed the creative interpretation of the songs. I used Suno AI to assist with musical production, while AI-generated visual elements and video-editing tools contributed to the accompanying visual works.
I consider it important to distinguish the original literary writing from the technological processes used to develop its musical and visual interpretations.
The poems existed long before these tools became available. Their images, characters, and central ideas provided the foundations for the later songs.
AI-assisted production offered a new means of exploring those foundations through sound.
This experience has also made me reconsider the relationship between the written word and artistic performance.
A poem can be read silently, spoken aloud, interpreted through music, or developed into a visual narrative. Each form creates a different encounter with the same imaginative source.
5. Does a Poem Remain the Same When It Becomes a Song?
Returning to these three poems after more than a decade taught me that literary creation does not always end with publication.
A poem may continue to develop within the imagination of its author.
Yet the relationship between the original text and its adaptation is not always straightforward.
Some elements survive almost unchanged. Others are transformed. New phrases, rhythms, and images may emerge, while certain passages disappear.
What remains is not necessarily the same text, but a recognizable imaginative identity.
In my case, The Strawberry Woman became Strawberry Light, Rifle and Violin became Rifle or Violin?, and Sofia’s Masterpiece Story inspired Bridges & Ghosts.
They are not identical works, nor are they entirely separate creations.
They belong to a continuing conversation between my earlier poetry and my more recent musical experiments.
I would be interested to hear the thoughts of other poets on this question:
When a poet rewrites an earlier poem as a song, preserving its central images and emotional meaning while changing its words and structure, is the result still the same poem—or has a new literary work been born?
