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.

After the death of my mother, 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.

My wife and I are simplifying our days. The server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit the quieter life we want.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the 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.

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 M

Middle Passage

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 brutal transatlantic voyage that carried enslaved Africans to the Americas.

Detailed Definition
The Middle Passage is a central wound in African diasporic memory. In poetry, it appears through images of ships, water, chains, darkness, death, and ancestral voices. Poets return to it to mourn, recover erased histories, and show how modern Black identity is haunted by forced displacement.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem imagines the hold of a slave ship as a place of terror and memory; The Middle Passage appears through water, chains, darkness, and lost names; A speaker hears ancestral voices rising from the Atlantic; The ocean becomes both grave and archive
Additional Notes
The Middle Passage is one of the most profound historical reference points in African American poetry, representing the transatlantic forced transport of enslaved Africans under horrific conditions. Poetic treatments often use ocean imagery, silence, ghosts, bodily suffering, and ancestral voices to evoke historical trauma. Students should understand Middle Passage references as foundational to diasporic identity, collective memory, and poetic attempts to speak what history often rendered unspeakable.
Also Known As
Transatlantic slave passage
Skip to main content