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

Moon Landing

Historical Allusion
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

The 1969 Moon Landing by Apollo 11 achieved humanity's first steps on the lunar surface.

Detailed Definition
The Moon Landing of July 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the lunar surface, stands in poetry as perhaps the purest symbol of technological wonder, collective aspiration, and the human impulse to reach beyond the known. Watched live by hundreds of millions, it crystallised an age of possibility and Cold War competition into a single, luminous image. Poets draw on it to evoke the sublime meeting of science and dream, the fragility of the human figure against the vastness of space, and the bittersweet question of what we do with the worlds we reach.
Example
Example in poetry:
A student poet might write "Armstrong stepped off the ladder and onto a surface that had only ever known metaphor — suddenly the moon was a place" to use the Moon Landing as a shift from symbol to reality; Archibald MacLeish's poem "Voyage to the Moon," published in the New York Times on the day of the landing, asks what it means for humanity to see the Earth from outside; A poet writing "we went to the moon and looked back at the Earth and for the first time saw it whole — fragile, blue, and utterly alone in the dark" uses the landing's famous Earth-rise image; Pablo Neruda's "Odes to Common Things" and his capacity for cosmic wonder find a counterpart in the Moon Landing's invitation to poetic awe; A student poet might write "the moon had been ours in poems for ten thousand years — in 1969 we lent it back to physics for a moment"
Additional Notes
The Moon Landing offers poets the theme of humanity's largest collective achievement — the moment the Earth was first seen whole and blue from another world. It can carry wonder, technological optimism, and the strange sadness of a dream achieved that has not been repeated. But it also sits in the context of the Cold War space race, which frames it as competition as much as exploration. The astronauts' own descriptions of seeing the Earth from the Moon — the "overview effect" — have themselves become a kind of poetry. Philip Larkin's sceptical "Sad Steps" (written around the same time) offers a useful counterpoint.
Also Known As
Apollo 11 Moon Landing Apollo 11 Landing First Moon Landing Lunar Landing Moonwalk
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