A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard



Poem fractal

Side by side

Random

0.012 apart. A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

This number is read from the build of the lines. The bright edge is that number, carried outward until the pattern repeats.

Foam

by Witter Bynner

−0.0716 + 0.1782i

Drawing the boundary…

To Sleep

by Philip Bourke Marston

−0.0742 + 0.1662i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.

Foam

by Witter Bynner

The ocean tosses patterns at my feet —
Large, irresistible, minute and lost.
A busy rabbit-headed grasshopper
Carves a green blade down to the yellow spine.
Over the mounded sand hot-foots an ant.
A ghostly spider pauses in the sun.
Across the sea those armies, that small chaos
Of rabbit-headed hot-foot ghostly men
Are ocean-patterns brought me by the surf,
Large, irresistible, minute and lost.

To Sleep

by Philip Bourke Marston

O tender sleep! queen over ev'ry queen! 
Our mother, since from thy deep womb we spring, 
And unto thee return, and to thee bring 
Our weary limbs and wearier hearts, and lean 
Upon thy breast; thou who hast pitying seen 
Our woe on earth, and blunted life's sharp sting, 
And when we were in trouble did so sing, 
That we forgot what was and what had been, — 

Open thy gentle arms and take me in; 
Hide me! oh, hide me in thy mother-breast, 
Between thy bosom sweet, and long, soft hair: 
Yea, let me from thee drink the milk of rest: 
Lay all my virtue level with my sin, 
So that I have no thought of days that were. 

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