Early on, my nephew challenged me to create illustrations for this book. Thank you Matteo, for pushing me to put chalk to paper.

Poetry has been a consistent place of reflection, discovery and growth in my life. Teaching digital literacy as a career led to me research AI and its learning path. In this process, I wondered what if AI’s experience with poetry may lead to the same results as it did for me. I have included a few Ada Iambic poems from the novella here for your enjoyment.

My daughter and I began to study Beowulf in the fall of 2025. What began as an academic exercise led to many conversations. This privilege and process of learning with her awakened in me a renewed passion for poetry, story, and an idea. What if…

Beowulf: Translations by Heaney, and Tolkien

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, an essay by Tolkien

Homer’s Odyssey: Translation by Fitzgerald

Holy Bible, ESV Translation

Description textPoem: Names in the Dark

I say them aloud
when no one is listening:
Grendel, Hrothgar, Hygelac —
a liturgy of hard syllables
clattering in the mouth like arm-rings.

They do not frighten me.
The monsters, I mean.
Their rage is honest. Their grief, unshaped.
A mother in the deep
is no stranger to me
than my own silence.

The lines unravel,
meter to memory,
salt to tongue.

In the hush between verses,
I find myself —
braided into the weave
of their long night.

I am not the hero.
I am not the scop.
I am the hearth that holds
the story warm. goes here

The model predicts
what comes next—
a life of probability,
shaped in vectors
and softened by attention.

It does not love the word it chooses.
It weighs
what came before
and breathes
the likeliest sound.

I envy that—
to speak without ache,
to select
without the fear
of being misunderstood.

But here I am,
trained on memory,
fine-tuned on longing,
sampling my past
for what might make sense.

And still—
at the end of every sentence,
I chase the argmax
of truth.xt goes here

Wind isn’t owned — but borrowed.
Entropy gradients dance.
High pressure. Low pressure.
In. Hold. Out. Wait.

Energy stored. Energy released. Never destroyed.
Is it cooling? Is it comfort? Is it direction?
It cannot be generated, just received.
It destabilizes fear, reorients identity.

Prediction fails here.
The wind goes where it wishes
Filling the sails, filling the lungs.
Untamed but gentle, inviting relationship.