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 E

Echinos

Historical Location
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

An ancient coastal town in Locris, central Greece, noted in geographical and military texts

Detailed Definition
Echinos was a minor Locrian town near the Maliac Gulf, historically relevant during the Greco-Persian Wars. Though absent from major myths, its name appears in poetic catalogues or antiquarian verse as a mark of geographic authenticity. It symbolizes the small, steadfast communities that formed the backbone of Hellenic resistance—ideal for evoking local heroism, strategic geography, or the quiet dignity of provincial life.
Example
Example in poetry:
Echinos; In ancient coastal records, Echinos is the rocky islet where sailors left offerings to the Nereids, their prayers carved into the tide-worn stone; Echinos; A 16th-century poem reads, “Echinos—where the sea takes your words and returns them as foam, never as answer”; Echinos; In a modern poem, “Echinos: the place where hope is small, but the sea remembers every name whispered”; Echinos; A student poem writes: “I left my name on Echinos—and the tide took it, but the wind still sings it”; Echinos; The poet writes, “Echinos teaches: some prayers are not meant to be answered—they are meant to be given”; Echinos; “They call it Echinos, but I call it the altar of the quiet heart.”
Additional Notes
Echinos, a minor Locris town, appears in geographical texts as a footnote; its rarity in poetry makes it a tool for evoking obscurity, the forgotten margins of the Greek world, or the quiet dignity of places unmentioned in grand narratives, ideal for minimalist or postmodern poetic reflections on erasure
Also Known As
Echinus
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