The prompt: Take this paragraph and turn it into a world class poem in the style of Roethke, Plath and that era of American poets: 

The prompt: Take this paragraph and turn it into a world class poem in the style of Roethke, Plath and that era of American poets:

“An AI may never be able to write a great poem — a truly original poem — because a poem is made not of language but of experience, and the defining aspect of human experience is the constant collision between our wishes and reality, the sharp violation of our expectations, the demolition of our plans.”

The AI Claude 4.0 responded :

The Machine That Cannot Bleed

Never will silicon dream
the green thrust of root through dark earth—
that ancient muscular heave
where my father’s greenhouse ghost
still tends the breathing stems,
still knows the grammar of growth
written in soil and season.
Never will circuits taste
the copper of disappointment,
that metallic flowering
when love’s architecture collapses
into rubble and regret,
when the careful scaffolding
of what we hoped to build
lies scattered like dead leaves
in November’s harsh accounting.
The artificial tongue
speaks in borrowed frequencies,
mimics the mourning dove’s
liquid sorrow, but cannot
feel the weight of loss
pressing against the ribs
like a stone in the chest.
For poems are not woven
from the lexicon’s bright threads
but from the dark matter
of lived collision—
the moment when desire
meets the world’s hard refusal,
when expectations shatter
like greenhouse glass
in an unexpected storm.
Here, in the wreckage
of what we thought we knew,
among the sharp fragments
of our demolished plans,
we discover the raw material
of true making—
not the smooth assemblage
of algorithmic precision,
but the jagged beauty
born from the violence
of wish meeting stone.

July 12, 2025 SGL Brunswick, ME