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

Home › Glossary › Letter C

Cuban Missile Crisis

Historical Allusion
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 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis brought the U.S. and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war over missiles in Cuba.

Detailed Definition
Evoking nuclear brinkmanship, existential dread, and the razor's edge between diplomacy and annihilation, this allusion refers to the tense thirteen-day standoff in October 1962 between the United States and the Soviet Union over Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba. The world held its breath as leaders weighed decisions that could have ended civilisation. Poets invoke this moment to explore Cold War anxiety, the paralysis of fear, the weight of political power, and the eerie normalcy of daily life lived under the shadow of potential nuclear destruction — a tension that became a defining psychological condition of the mid-twentieth century.
Example
Example in poetry:
The Cuban Missile Crisis appears in poetry as the moment when civilisation came closest to its own deliberate erasure; A student poet might write "for thirteen days in October, history held its breath and we all lived inside that pause" to capture the crisis's existential tension; Robert Frost, America's unofficial poet laureate, was sent to meet Khrushchev the year before the crisis — poets have used this near-meeting to explore how art and apocalypse coexisted in that era; Seamus Heaney wrote about the Cold War's atmosphere of dread, and the Cuban Missile Crisis represents that dread's most concentrated moment; A poet writing "Kennedy and Khrushchev played chess with the planet and neither man wanted to be the one who knocked the board over" uses the crisis as a geopolitical game image
Additional Notes
The Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the world came to nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, and it is often used as an allusion to the razor's edge — the thirteen days when decisions made in Washington and Moscow could have ended civilisation. Poets invoke it to explore the helplessness of ordinary people while catastrophe is decided by a small number of men in rooms, the strange texture of life continuing normally under existential threat, and the role of individual courage (Vasili Arkhipov, for instance, is worth knowing) in preventing disaster.
Also Known As
October Crisis Missile Crisis Caribbean Crisis Cuban October Crisis
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