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

Bookwus

Mythology
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 Kwakwaka’wakw forest spirit who lures and captures the souls of lost or disobedient children, embodying wilderness danger.

Detailed Definition
Bookwus is a fearsome Kwakwaka’wakw spirit who lives in the woods and captures the souls of the drowned or lost, keeping them in his cave. He appears in potlatch ceremonies and cautionary tales. In poetry, Bookwus represents the dangers of disconnection from community and land, often invoked in verses about grief, spiritual retrieval, and the consequences of wandering from cultural paths.
Example
Example in poetry:
Bookwus, the Kwakwaka’wakw forest ghost, haunts poems as the consequence of disrespecting nature; A cautionary verse shows Bookwus luring loggers into eternal fog with whispers of gold; Poets use Bookwus to explore eco-grief: “His hollow eyes are the stumps we left behind”; In children’s poetry, Bookwus teaches forest etiquette through eerie but kind riddles; His mossy breath becomes a metaphor for the land’s memory of broken promises.
Additional Notes
Bookwus (or Bukwus) is a Kwakwaka’wakw (Northwest Coast) wild man of the woods who lures humans to become ghosts; he represents the dangers of the untamed forest and spiritual disorientation—poets may use Bookwus to explore liminality or loss, but must recognize his role in potlatch narratives and avoid exoticizing his appearance or behavior.
Also Known As
Bukwus Wild Man of the Woods
Skip to main content