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.

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 S

Sacred secular fusion

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

Sacred secular fusion describes the blending of religious and worldly themes, language, music, or emotional registers within poetic expression.

Detailed Definition
African American poetry often moves fluidly between church traditions and secular life, combining gospel cadences with romantic longing, political protest, urban realism, or musical innovation. This fusion reflects cultural traditions where spiritual and everyday experience are not sharply separated. The term helps interpret poetry drawing simultaneously from sermon, blues, prayer, desire, humour, and social critique, revealing interconnected rather than opposing cultural energies.
Example
Example in poetry:
James Weldon Johnson’s blending of sacred language and worldly concerns reflects sacred secular fusion; A poem combining gospel cadences with romantic longing demonstrates sacred secular fusion; Verse mixing prayer imagery with political protest illustrates this term; A blues influenced poem with spiritual undertones reflects sacred secular fusion; Poetry refusing strict division between sacred and everyday life exemplifies this concept
Additional Notes
Sacred secular fusion in African American poetry reflects the historical reality that Black sacred and secular cultures have never been as cleanly separated as dominant (and often specifically white Protestant) religious frameworks assume. The blues, often considered secular music, is saturated with spiritual longing and biblical imagery; the spirituals contain coded secular content about escape and resistance. Poets like Langston Hughes (who shocked some readers with his gospel-inflected secular love poems), Lucille Clifton, and Sonia Sanchez move fluidly between sacred and secular registers. Students should resist imposing a sharp sacred/secular binary onto African American poetry; the fusion is a feature, not a flaw. Related terms include sanctified rhythm, preacherly cadence, blues poetics, and liberation theology.
Also Known As
gospel blues spiritual jazz divine profane blend
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