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



Reed

Flora
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 tall grass-like plant with jointed stems and feathery flower heads, growing in wetlands.

Detailed Definition
Reeds symbolize flexibility, music, and liminal spaces in poetry. Their traditional use making musical instruments links them to art and breath transformed to sound. Reed beds represent margins between land and water, hosting rich biodiversity. In poetry, reeds suggest whispers, rustling secrets, and nature's music. Their flexible stems that bend in wind make them symbols of yielding to forces rather than breaking, adaptation, and survival through flexibility rather than rigid strength.
Example
Example in poetry:
Reeds growing in wetlands represent boundary zones between water and land; In biblical poetry, Moses among bulrushes connects reeds to salvation and concealment; The sound of wind through reeds creates musical imagery and Pan's pipes; Reeds used for thatching appear in poems about traditional building and sustainable materials; In marsh poetry, reeds symbolize adaptation to saturated soils and tidal influence; The plants' tall, vertical growth creates striking silhouettes in landscape poetry
Additional Notes
Reeds carry rich symbolic weight in literature, from biblical allusions to “a reed shaken with the wind” to classical associations with the god Pan and reed pipes. Growing at water’s edge, they mark liminal spaces between land and water. Their rustling soundscape makes them ideal for evoking atmosphere, secrecy, and quiet melancholy in marshland or riverine settings.
Also Known As
Common Reed Phragmites sedge Reid
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