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 H

hatchet

Tools
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 hatchet is a small, one-handed axe used for chopping, splitting, and trimming wood.

Detailed Definition
Compact and easily carried, the hatchet is used for kindling, carpentry, camping, hunting, and small-scale forestry. Its practical intimacy distinguishes it from the larger felling axe, yet its sharp blade gives it equally strong associations with danger. In poetry it may evoke frontier survival, domestic woodcutting, violence, or sudden severance. Because it can both prepare warmth and inflict injury, the hatchet often embodies the uneasy closeness of usefulness and threat, civilisation and brutality.
Example
Example in poetry:
He split the kindling with a hatchet beside the snow-covered cabin; A hatchet may represent survival, domestic labour, or sudden violence; The small blade flashed like a cold thought in his hand; A poet could contrast the hatchet's ability to prepare warmth with its potential to wound.
Additional Notes
A hatchet is smaller than a full-sized axe and can generally be used with one hand. It is associated with kindling, camping, carpentry, survival, and small-scale chopping. In poetry it can appear harmlessly beside a woodpile or threateningly in a scene of violence. This contrast makes it effective for exploring the thin boundary between useful labour and danger. Related terms include axe, wood axe, tomahawk, chopping, kindling, cabin, survival, severance, hand tool, blade, domestic work, and the expression burying the hatchet.
Also Known As
hand axe small axe
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