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 M

Mirror-word poem

Form
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 poem structured around symmetrical, mirrored words or patterns.

Detailed Definition
A mirror-word poem is a highly constrained form in which individual words or phrases are palindromic or arranged so that the entire poem reads the same backward as forward, emphasizing linguistic play, formal discipline, and conceptual reflections on time, self, or perception.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem where the title or a line is an anagram or palindrome; A poem where the key words are reversible, such as 'level,' 'rotor,' or 'madam'; A concrete poem that incorporates words spelled backward or words that read the same both ways; A poem that explicitly plays with the duality of words that are the same backward and forward: 'Step back, and see the noon sun rise. Madam / A gift is sent to refer back.'
Additional Notes
Mirror-word poem: A poem built on the concept of palindrome or anadiplosis, where specific words or phrases are repeated in a forward-backward pattern, creating a literal mirror effect in the language.
Also Known As
Word-mirror poem reversed word poem reflective-word verse Ambigram poem
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