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 M

Malediction

Folklore
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 formal curse or invocation of evil, often spoken with ritual precision, meant to invoke divine or demonic retribution.

Detailed Definition
Maledictions in poetry represent the weight of spoken words as divine or infernal commands. They appear in epic and liturgical verse as curses that echo beyond death—where language is not metaphor, but mechanism, and the tongue is a blade that never rusts.
Example
Example in poetry:
Malediction: “May your tongue rot with every lie you tell” (traditional Irish curse); “Thorn and bramble choke your path” (Anglo-Saxon poetic imprecation); “May your wine turn to vinegar in the cup” (Biblical echo in folk verse); “Your name shall vanish like salt in rain” (West African poetic curse); “Sleep shall flee you as you fled the truth” (modern lyric malediction).
Additional Notes
Malediction is a formal curse spoken with ritual precision, invoking divine or demonic retribution—often in verse, rhyme, or inverted prayer. Unlike spontaneous hexes, maledictions are performative, public, and legalistic in structure. In poetry, they represent the power of language as weapon, the weight of oaths, and the sacredness of spoken harm. Poets use them to explore justice, vengeance, and the moral gravity of words.
Also Known As
Curse Anathema cursed phrase Hex
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