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



Yairdside

Dialect
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

Belonging to the yard, garden, burial ground, or enclosed home place.

Detailed Definition
Yairdside describes the intimate edge of domestic and ancestral space. A yairdside poem may attend to gates, hens, graves, tools, weeds, and the voices of people working close to the house. The term makes enclosure feel porous, since family history and ordinary labor meet there. It suits writing about inheritance, maintenance, and the way a small piece of ground can hold both daily routine and generations of remembered presence.
Example
Example in poetry:
“At yairdside, the kye grazed softly beneath the elder tree,” uses yairdside to mean beside the yard or garden; “She waited yairdside while the evening bell rang from the kirk,” places the speaker beside a churchyard or enclosed yard; “The bairn found primroses growing yairdside,” uses the dialect word to create a rural Scots setting; “A blackbird sang yairdside, among the nettles and old stones,” combines the term with concrete natural imagery; “He laid the spade yairdside and watched the last light fade,” shows how yairdside can establish a quiet location in a poem.
Additional Notes
Yairdside is a dialect adjective or noun describing something connected with the yaird, an enclosed yard, garden, burial ground, or home place. The word is especially associated with Scots and northern British usage, where a yaird may be a cultivated plot beside a house or a graveyard surrounding a church. Depending on context, yairdside can suggest a location, as in “the yairdside path,” or a local way of life rooted in the home enclosure and its land. Related terms include yaird, yard, kirkyard, garden, and homestead. Readers should use surrounding context to decide whether the reference is domestic, agricultural, or funerary.
Also Known As
Yardside Yardland
Skip to main content