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.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this 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

Home › Glossary › Letter A

Arafat

World Religion
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The plain east of Mecca where pilgrims gather on the 9th of Dhul-Hijjah for Wuquf, the pinnacle of Hajj and a day of forgiveness.

Detailed Definition
Standing at Arafat (Wuquf) is essential to Hajj—where sins are washed away and souls stand exposed before God. In poetry, Arafat is the theater of mercy: sun-baked, crowded, yet intimate. Poets liken it to the Day of Judgment in miniature, where tears mix with dust, and every heart pleads, “O Forgiver, forgive!”—making it the rawest expression of human need and divine grace.
Example
Example in poetry:
A pilgrim’s poem: “On Arafat’s plain, sins dissolve like salt in mercy’s ocean”; In a mystical verse, “Arafat is not a place—it is the moment the heart stands naked before Truth”; A modern reflection: “I stood at Arafat and begged not for heaven, but for the courage to be human”; A minimalist lyric: “Arafat: where ‘I’ vanishes, and only ‘We’ remain before the Divine.”
Additional Notes
Arafat is the climactic site of Hajj, where pilgrims stand (wuquf) in prayer and repentance from noon to sunset on the 9th of Dhul-Hijjah, reenacting Adam and Eve’s reunion and seeking divine mercy. Tradition holds that this is where Muhammad delivered his Farewell Sermon. Missing wuquf invalidates Hajj, highlighting its spiritual centrality. In Islamic poetry, Arafat becomes a metaphor for existential exposure before the Divine—Rumi speaks of the heart as a plain of Arafat where secrets are unveiled. For scholars, its symbolism bridges ritual, ethics, and eschatology.
Also Known As
Jabal al-Rahmah Mount Arafat Plain of Arafat
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