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 L

Look the other way

Idiomatic Phrase
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

To deliberately ignore something wrong or improper; to pretend not to notice in order to avoid involvement or conflict.

Detailed Definition
This idiom of deliberate inattention describes the act of choosing not to see—whether from cowardice, complicity, self-preservation, or compassion. In poetry, it appears in works of witness and moral responsibility, examining the ethics of looking away in the face of injustice. Poets invoke it to critique those who enable harm through strategic blindness, and to honor those who refused to avert their gaze. The phrase also appears more sympathetically in poems about survival—situations where looking the other way is what allows fragile peace to hold. Looking and not-looking, seeing and refusing to see, are among poetry's most fundamental concerns, making this idiom a natural point of entry for lyric meditation on vision, witness, and moral imagination.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about complicity might use look the other way to name the specific moral failure of those who see what is happening and choose not to see — the poem insisting on the distinction between ignorance and chosen blindness; In a poem about a community's response to private violence — the neighbor who hears what happens next door and looks the other way — the idiom names the collective abandonment that makes private harm possible; A poem about the politics of witness might ask when looking the other way is survival and when it is collaboration — exploring the situations where the cost of seeing is so high that not-seeing becomes a form of self-preservation; In a poem about the historical record's relationship to atrocity, look the other way describes the official response — the deliberate inattention that allows the record to be clean, the deniability to be maintained; A poem about a speaker's own failure to act — the moment they looked the other way and the consequence that followed — might use the phrase in confession, examining the gap between the person they believe themselves to be and the person the moment revealed; The idiom suits poems about the politics of attention, asking whose suffering is visible, whose is routinely looked away from, and what looking away makes possible that sustained attention would prevent
Additional Notes
This phrase implies deliberate refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing. In poetry, it is powerful for moral criticism: neighbours ignore cruelty, officials ignore corruption, lovers ignore betrayal, societies ignore suffering. The visual act of looking away can be staged vividly. Related ideas include blindness, averted eyes, complicity, silence, and the ethics of witness.
Also Known As
Turn a blind eye Ignore deliberately
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