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 S

scavenger

Historical Office
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 street cleaner or waste collector, often employed by municipalities

Detailed Definition
The scavenger appears in poetry as a necessary yet ignored custodian of urban order. Historically tasked with removing refuse, scavengers maintained public health in crowded cities. In verse, they evoke themes of cleansing, invisibility, and the labor that upholds civilization. Their presence—especially in industrial-era poetry—underscores the hidden costs of progress and the dignity of unglamorous work essential to communal life.
Example
Example in poetry:
In urban elegies, the scavenger collects remnants of a city’s discarded life; Poets compare the scavenger to a poet—gathering fragments to make meaning; The scavenger’s cart becomes a mobile archive of society’s excesses; In post-apocalyptic verse, scavengers inherit the earth, piecing together civilization; Baudelaire’s flâneur shares traits with the scavenger—both observers of urban decay; Modern poetry uses “scavenger” to critique consumerism and waste.
Additional Notes
Scavengers were municipal workers who cleaned streets of refuse, ash, and animal waste—precursors to modern sanitation crews; often employed by parishes, they maintained urban hygiene—poetic scavengers may represent civic order, invisibility, or the dignity of unglamorous labor; their brooms and carts animate the sensory reality of historical cityscapes.
Also Known As
street cleaner dustman gong farmer
Skip to main content