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 W

Whimbrel

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 large curlew with a striped crown and haunting, bubbling call.

Detailed Definition
Whimbrels symbolize long-distance endurance, ancestral memory, and the voice of coastal solitude in poetry. Their migrations span continents, evoking themes of return and displacement. Their calls over mudflats or tundra create sonic landscapes of longing. Poets use whimbrels to explore the hidden connections between hemispheres, the fragility of stopover sites, and the ancient rhythms that guide creatures across vast, invisible pathways in an increasingly fragmented world.
Example
Example in poetry:
In coastal poetry, the whimbrel’s striped crown and bubbling call symbolize long-distance endurance and the voice of tidal solitude; Poets use the whimbrel’s migration from Arctic tundra to South American coasts to explore themes of global connection and ancestral memory; Ecopoets reference whimbrels to discuss the vulnerability of stopover sites like mudflats to development and sea-level rise; Its long, downcurved bill appears in descriptive verse as an adaptation for probing deep into sand and mud; The whimbrel’s call over estuaries adds acoustic texture to poems set in liminal, ever-changing landscapes; Its similarity to the curlew—but with striped head—highlights subtle distinctions in shorebird poetry.
Additional Notes
Whimbrel: A smaller relative of the curlew with a distinctive seven-note call, the whimbrel symbolizes coastal migration, global connectivity (they cross oceans), and haunting soundscapes. Their presence on mudflats or beaches suits poems about travel, thresholds, or the music of emptiness.
Also Known As
Eurasian Whimbrel Hudsonian Whimbrel Curlew (colloquially)
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