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

Sufi

World Religion
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 practitioner of Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam, devoted to divine love, inner purification, and union with God.

Detailed Definition
Sufi in poetry is the lover who sings to the Beloved in wine and ruin—the one who sees God in the mirror, the dust, the tear. Poets use them to dissolve religion into longing: the mosque is the heart, the call to prayer is the soul’s cry. They become the poem’s fire: not doctrine, but devotion made visible.
Example
Example in poetry:
Sufi is the mystic of divine love—Rumi writes: “Sufi is the one who drinks the wine of God, though the world calls it poison”; A modern lyric: “In New York, a Sufi danced in snow—no music, just the rhythm of surrender”; A haiku: “Whirling in dust—Sufi: / love’s spinning prayer”; Another: “Sufi doesn’t pray to God—he becomes the prayer”; A devotional verse: “They called him mad—Sufi laughed: ‘I see God in every face, even yours’”; A minimalist line: “Mystic. Lover. Seeker. / Sufi: the soul’s song.”
Additional Notes
Sufis seek fana (annihilation) and baqa (subsistence in God); their poetry—Rumi, Hafiz, Bulleh Shah—is not metaphor but ecstatic utterance born of dhikr and sama; the rose, the wine, the beloved are not symbols but direct experiences of divine presence; students must read Sufi verse not as allegory but as lived union, making it vital for interpreting mystical poetry as embodied ecstasy beyond doctrine.
Also Known As
Dervish Muslim Mystic Tasawwuf Practitioner Fakir Mystic
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