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 P

Palaepaphos

Historical Location
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 ancient city on Cyprus housing the famed sanctuary of Aphrodite at Paphos

Detailed Definition
Palaepaphos (Old Paphos) was the site of Aphrodite’s most ancient sanctuary, where she was said to have risen from the sea. In poetry, it symbolizes erotic origin, divine femininity, and Cypriot piety. From Homer to Shakespeare (“Pericles”), it appears as the heart of Aphrodite’s cult—evoking love, beauty, and the sacredness of desire in both celebratory and cautionary contexts.
Example
Example in poetry:
Palaepaphos; In Pausanias, Palaepaphos is the ancient sanctuary of Aphrodite, where her cult predates the Greeks, and the sacred stone still holds her presence; Palaepaphos; A 17th-century lyric reads, “Palaepaphos—where the goddess was not carved, but was the stone itself, worshipped before the first hymn”; Palaepaphos; In a modern poem, “Palaepaphos: the place where divinity was not represented—it was embodied”; Palaepaphos; A student poem writes: “I touched the stone of Palaepaphos—and felt the pulse of a goddess older than memory”; Palaepaphos; The poet writes, “Palaepaphos teaches: the oldest gods are not in temples—they are in the earth that remembers”; Palaepaphos; “They call it Palaepaphos, but I call it the womb of the first love.”
Additional Notes
Palaepaphos, home of Aphrodite’s oldest sanctuary, is a poetic nexus of fertility, ritual, and ancient femininity; its mention evokes pre-Greek religious continuity, making it ideal for hymns, feminist reinterpretations, or poems exploring the enduring power of earth-based goddess worship
Also Known As
Palaeopaphos Ancient Paphos
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