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

0.008 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.

Her Street

by Arthur Symons

−0.0230 + 0.0131i

Drawing the boundary…

An Unanswered Question

by Leonard Bacon

−0.0312 + 0.0137i

Drawing the boundary…

The poems

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

Her Street

by Arthur Symons

I passed your street of many memories.
     A sunset, sombre pink, the flush
     Of inner rose-leaves idle fingers crush,
Died softly, as the rose that dies.
All the high heaven behind the roof lay thus,
     Tenderly dying, touched with pain
     A little; standing there I saw again
The sunsets that were dear to us.

I knew not if ’twere bitter or more sweet
     To stand and watch the roofs, the sky.
     O bitter to be there and you not nigh,
Yet this had been that blessed street.
How the name thrilled me, there upon the wall!
    There was the house, the windows there
     Against the rosy twilight high and bare,
The pavement-stones: I knew them all!

Days that have been, days that have fallen cold!
     I stood and gazed, and thought of you,
     Until remembrance sweet and mournful drew
Tears to eyes smiling as of old.
So, sad and glad, your memory visibly
     Alive within my eyes, I turned;
     And, through a window, met two eyes that burned,
Tenderly questioning, on me.

An Unanswered Question

by Leonard Bacon

I have heard whispers that I cannot speak,
Melodies, whose uncapturable tone
Drifted by starlight out of the unknown,
And left me shaken with beauty, and faint and weak.
And in the midnight when the timbers creak
Dreams have possessed me, greater than my own,
And in my solitary heart alone
I have seen grails I never will dare seek.

Why thunder the incalculable wings
About me so, if I am not to fly?
Why do the voices yet within me cry
Melodious? Why do the wild lights gleam,
And spill strange beauty over common things?
I am not visionary. Do I dream?

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