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 B

Blackberry

Flora
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

A bramble fruit with juicy, dark aggregate berries, often symbolizing wildness, temptation, or the passage of time in poetry.

Detailed Definition
Blackberries appear in verse as emblems of untamed nature and ephemeral sweetness, their thorny vines suggesting both protection and peril. In Seamus Heaney’s work, they represent childhood innocence and the inevitable decay of beauty. Their late-summer ripening ties them to themes of maturity, regret, and the bittersweet harvest of memory, making them potent symbols in lyrical and elegiac poetry.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Seamus Heaney’s “Blackberry-Picking,” the fruit symbolizes childhood excitement and the inevitable disappointment of decay: “Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not”; Sylvia Plath uses blackberries in “Blackberrying” to evoke isolation and the sea’s vastness: “The blue red juices stain my hands”; In “Blackberries” by Yusef Komunyakaa, the fruit becomes a site of racial memory and rural labor; Galway Kinnell’s “Blackberry Eating” uses the berries to explore the sensuality of language itself: “I love to go out in late September… eating blackberries for breakfast.”
Additional Notes
Blackberry: In Flora, "Blackberry" refers to the aggregate fruit of Rubus fruticosus and related species; rich in symbolism, blackberries often represent temptation, transience, or wild abundance in poetry—consider their thorny canes and fleeting summer ripeness; note that in botanical terms, each "drupelet" is a tiny fruit, making the blackberry an aggregate of drupes, not a true berry; useful in ekphrastic or pastoral verse for texture and seasonal imagery.
Also Known As
Bramble Dewberry Brambleberry brimble
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