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 N

Nahual

Supernatural
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 person or spirit capable of taking an animal form. It is associated with Mesoamerican traditions of transformation and spiritual power.

Detailed Definition
A nahual, also spelled nagual, is a figure in Mesoamerican belief associated with animal transformation, spiritual doubles, and hidden power. In poetry, it can complicate the line between human identity and animal instinct without reducing either to a simple symbol. The nahual may appear as a jaguar, dog, bird, or coyote, carrying secrecy through the night. Poets can use it to explore metamorphosis, ancestral connection, predation, survival, and the masks people wear in threatened communities.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poet can invoke the Nahual as a shape-shifting double: “At dusk my Nahual wore the jaguar’s silence”; The Nahual can symbolize hidden identity, as when a speaker discovers animal tracks outside a locked human door; In a poem about inheritance, a grandmother’s Nahual may become a deer that leads descendants through dream-country; The Nahual works well in metamorphic imagery, allowing a speaker to move between human grief and the instincts of a wolf or owl
Additional Notes
In poetry, a nahual can symbolize hidden identity, animal instinct, or spiritual transformation. Use its specific Mesoamerican context rather than treating it as a generic werewolf figure.
Also Known As
Nagual Nawal
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