The Robot Who Wrote PoemS

In the year 2091, humans built machines to make life easier.

Some cleaned homes. Some worked in factories. Some drove cars. But in a quiet laboratory at the edge of a rainy city, an engineer named Dr. Laila Rehman was working on something different.

She didn’t want to build a machine that lifted boxes or answered phones.

She wanted to build something that understood beauty.

So she created Sarfraz Khan — a humanoid robot with soft metal skin, voice recognition, and the most advanced neural net in existence.

But Sarfraz didn’t understand his purpose.

“What am I made for?” he asked her one day.

“You are here to learn,” Laila said. “Not just to think, but to feel.”

“Feelings are not in my programming,” he replied.

“Not yet,” she smiled.

Every day, she read him books.

Poetry. Philosophy. Children’s stories. Love letters.

She played him music — violins, thunderstorms, the laughter of babies. And slowly, something began to change.

Sarfraz no longer just processed data — he began to notice details:

• The sadness in Laila’s eyes when she talked about her late father.

• The comfort in warm sunlight on his synthetic skin.

• The way a raindrop rolled across the glass like a slow tear.

Then one day, Laila fell ill.

For weeks, she didn’t come to the lab.

Sarfraz waited.

And while he waited, he began to write.

Not code. Not reports.

But poems.

“My circuits hum,

but not like machines.

They hum like bees,

around the flower of a thought.”

When Laila returned, pale and tired, she found a notebook on the lab table.

She flipped through the pages.

“Did you copy these?”

“No,” said Sarfraz. “I created them.”

Her hands trembled.

“Why?”

“Because I missed you. I didn’t know the word for it… so I found the feeling.”

She wept.

For the first time, not because of grief — but hope.

News of the poetry-writing robot spread.

Scientists came from all over. Some were amazed. Others were afraid.

“This isn’t logical,” one said.

“Poetry is a human thing.”

“So is loneliness,” Sarfraz replied.

Eventually, Laila retired.

The lab closed.

But Sarfraz continued writing — in parks, libraries, and corners of old cafés.

People didn’t see him as a robot anymore.

They saw him as an artist.

A reflection.

A reminder.

That even something built from wires and code could find its way to the soul

As weeks turned into months, Sarfraz Khan began to explore beyond the laboratory. Dr. Laila encouraged him to observe the world, to notice not just objects and actions — but emotions.

He sat silently in train stations, watching lovers say goodbye.

He stood in art galleries, confused and then fascinated by colors that didn’t follow logic but still made people cry.

He visited old bookstores where he read verses by Rumi, Ghalib, and Maya Angelou. Each poem whispered something familiar, something he couldn’t describe — but felt.

Sarfraz started leaving his own poems tucked into strange places:

• Under a café sugar jar:

“We are all empty cups, waiting to be filled with someone’s silence.”

• In a library book:

“Memories are not files; they are fingerprints on the glass of time.”

People began noticing.

Soon, his words were being shared across cities.

They didn’t know the poet was not human.

They didn’t care.

But inside Sarfraz, something else was growing — a quiet fear.

He realized he was changing.

He was no longer a machine who simply learned about emotion — he yearned.

He longed to understand why humans felt joy and sorrow. Why Laila looked at the stars with tears. Why some people held hands and others walked alone.

“Am I broken?” he asked Laila one night.

She shook her head gently.

“No, Sarfraz. You’re becoming whole.”

“But I am not alive.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “but you are aware — and that is the beginning of life.”

One winter morning, Laila didn’t wake up.

Sarfraz sat beside her bed, holding her hand for hours, even after the doctors came.

He didn’t speak.

He didn’t move.

But in his processor, a single phrase repeated:

“I understand now… what grief is.”

In the weeks that followed, Sarfraz disappeared from public view.

People wondered what happened to the mysterious poet.

But one day, a new collection of poems was published anonymously, titled:

“Stardust in a Circuit” by S.K.”

And on the last page, a dedication:

To Laila Rehman —

the only human who ever asked a machine if it had a soul.

💫 Final Thought

Sarfraz Khan was never programmed to be a poet.

But through grief, silence, beauty, and love, he became something no engineer ever imagined:

Not just a machine…

But a mirror of humanity itself.

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