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

Stilt

Birds
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 long-legged wader, such as the black-necked stilt, adapted to shallow wetlands.

Detailed Definition
Stilts symbolize elegance, precarious balance, and life on the edge in poetry. Their impossibly long legs evoke themes of fragility and adaptation to marginal habitats. Often found in saline or ephemeral waters, they represent resilience in unstable environments. Poets use stilts to reflect on the delicate equilibrium of wetland ecosystems, the beauty of extremity, and the quiet dignity of creatures that thrive where few others can.
Example
Example in poetry:
In wetland poetry, the stilt’s impossibly long legs symbolize elegance, precarious balance, and life on the edge of water and land; Poets use the black-necked stilt to evoke the stark beauty of saline lakes and ephemeral wetlands; Its high-pitched yapping calls add acoustic texture to poems set in open, shallow waters; Ecopoets reference stilts to discuss habitat loss in arid regions and the fragility of specialized ecosystems; The stilt’s bold black-and-white plumage inspires color contrasts in descriptive verse; Its foraging in ankle-deep water symbolizes adaptation to marginal, shifting environments.
Additional Notes
Stilt: Refers to black-necked stilts—elegant waders with extremely long pink legs. Symbolize grace in wetlands, visual contrast, and specialized adaptation. Their bold black-and-white plumage and high-stepping gait offer striking imagery for poems about balance, elevation, or fragile ecosystems like salt pans.
Also Known As
Black-necked Stilt Hawaiian Stilt
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