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 D

Diaspora

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 global dispersal of African peoples and cultures through slavery, migration, and history.

Explore this topic in depth (1)

Protest Poetry — Protest poetry responds to injustice, violence, exclusion or threatened ways of life, but it is more than a political slogan in verse. This guide explores its history, its formal tools and the attentive reading needed to hear both its public claims and its human complexity.

Detailed Definition
Diaspora gives African American poetry a wider map of identity, connecting the United States to Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and beyond. Poets use it to explore exile, memory, hybridity, kinship, loss, and cultural survival across oceans, languages, and generations.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem links Harlem, Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South; Diaspora appears through oceans, ships, exile, and cultural survival; A speaker feels scattered yet connected to a global Black family; A poet uses African symbols to widen African American identity
Additional Notes
Diaspora is a crucial concept in African American poetry because it places Black American experience within a wider global history of displacement, forced migration, cultural exchange, and survival. Rather than limiting identity to national boundaries, diasporic poetry may connect Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, and the United States through shared historical memory. Students should look for themes of exile, hybridity, oceanic imagery, ancestral connection, and fragmented belonging when analysing diasporic poetic voices.
Other Meanings of “Diaspora”
Also Known As
African diaspora Black diaspora Exile
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