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

0.051 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.

Hokku

by Yone Noguchi

0.0112 − 1.1089i

Drawing the boundary…

When youthful faith hath fled

by John Gibson Lockhart

−0.0161 − 1.0653i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

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

Hokku

by Yone Noguchi

Bits of song—what else?
I, a rider of the stream,
Lone between the clouds.

Full of faults, you say.
What beauty in repentance!
Tears, songs—thus life flows.

But the march to life—
Break song to sing the new song!
Clouds leap, flowers bloom.

Song of sea in rain,
Voice of the sky, earth and men!
List, song of my heart.

When youthful faith hath fled

by John Gibson Lockhart

When youthful faith hath fled,
Of loving take thy leave;
Be constant to the dead—
The dead cannot deceive.

Sweet modest flowers of Spring,
How fleet your balmy day!
And Man's brief life can bring
No secondary May:

No earthly burst again
Of gladness out of gloom,
Fond hope and vision vain,
Ungrateful to the tomb.

But 'tis an old belief
That on some solemn shore
Beyond the sphere of grief
Dear friends shall meet once more:

Beyond the sphere of Time
And Sin and Fate's control,
Serene in endless prime
Of body and of soul.

That creed I fain would keep,
That hope I'll not forgo—
Eternal be the sleep
Unless to waken so!

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