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 Y

Yahrzeit

Genre
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

Jewish liturgical poetry composed to commemorate the annual death anniversary (yahrzeit), expressing grief, memory, and faith.

Detailed Definition
Yahrzeit is a Yiddish term (from German Jahrzeit, "year-time") referring to the annual Jewish memorial observance for the dead, marked by lighting a 24-hour candle. In poetry, yahrzeit has become a potent symbol of remembrance, grief, and the cyclical nature of mourning, often invoked in elegies or Holocaust literature. Poets like Adrienne Rich or Charles Reznikoff use yahrzeit imagery to explore intergenerational trauma, ritual continuity, and the ethics of memory. The yahrzeit candle’s flame serves as a metonym for the enduring presence of the absent. For students, this term exemplifies how liturgical concepts can be poetically repurposed to articulate complex emotional and historical legacies within a concise, resonant image.
Example
Example in poetry:
Jewish memorial poem for the dead: “Candle burns for Chaim, lost in ’42”; “Yahrzeit glass holds tears, not water”; annual remembrance through verse; blends Hebrew phrases with English elegy; ritualized grief in fixed form.
Additional Notes
Jewish anniversary of death, commemorated annually. Related to memorial poetry. Yahrzeit poems mark loss and remembrance. Study Jewish mourning traditions and liturgical context.
Also Known As
Anniversary prayer Memorial poem Yahrzeit remembrance Death-anniversary verse
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