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 A

Ancestral call

Black American
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

The ancestral call refers to the felt summons from deceased forebears, African origins, or the long line of Black ancestors whose experiences, sacrifices, and wisdom demand acknowledgement and continuation in the present.

Detailed Definition
In African American poetry, the ancestral call is both spiritual and political: it connects the living to those who came before, creating a sense of obligation to honour their memory and continue their struggles. Poets respond to the ancestral call through genealogical recovery, historical elegy, and the conscious invocation of ancestor figures. Related to blood memory, cultural memory, sankofa, naming ceremony, and Pan-Africanism, the ancestral call insists that the past is not behind Black people but within them, shaping identity and demanding response.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Lucille Clifton's poetry, the ancestral call manifests as direct address to her African ancestor Dahomey, summoning lineage across the Middle Passage as a source of power and identity; In Sonia Sanchez's work, the ancestral call appears when she invokes the voices of enslaved forebears to ground her present-day political anger in historical continuity; A poet might write of waking at 3am with an inexplicable grief belonging to no personal memory, recognising it as the ancestral call pulling them toward a history they never lived but carry; Gwendolyn Brooks implicitly answers an ancestral call in her Bronzeville poems by insisting on the full humanity of ordinary Black urban life, honouring those who built community before her; A student poet exploring ancestral call might write a dramatic monologue in which the speaker feels the names of unknown great-grandparents rising unbidden to the lips like a language almost forgotten; Nikky Finney's work answers the ancestral call by returning obsessively to the American South, treating its landscapes as saturated with the voices of those who suffered and survived there
Additional Notes
In Black American poetry the ancestral call builds on the felt summons from deceased forebears African origins or the long line of Black ancestors by functioning as a spiritual and emotional catalyst for reconnection identity reclamation and healing often appearing in dream visions rituals or haunting voices as in the work of Lucille Clifton or Audre Lorde; usage tip for poetry students and professors: pair it with blood memory or cultural reclamation to analyze how it counters diaspora disconnection and empowers resistance narratives while tracing its roots in African spiritual traditions preserved through oral storytelling and conjure practices.
Also Known As
Ancestral memory Ancestral summons Ancestral invocation
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