Goddess muscle, p.1
Goddess Muscle, page 1
First published in 2020 by Huia Publishers
39 Pipitea Street, PO Box 12-280
Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
www.huia.co.nz
ISBN 978-1-77550-400-9 (print)
ISBN 978-1-77550-404-7 (ebook)
Text copyright © Karlo Mila 2020
Illustrations and graphics copyright:
Illustration cover photo © Karlo Mila
Cover illustrated elements © Isobel Joy Te Aho-White
Carving image on dedication page © Papa Sean Bennett-Ogden
Page 10 © Naomi Maraea
Pages 50 & 68 © Delicia Sampero
Pages 70–71, 74 & 78 © Meleanna Meyer
This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the prior permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand
Ebook conversion 2020 by meBooks
For Papa Sean
who gave me the language to describe another world
Contents
Your People Will Gather around You: Love after Love
E Ngā Mate, Haere, Haere, Haere
Malaga: The Journey
Oceania
For Teresia Teaiwa
Bottled Ocean
A Conversation with Hone Tuwhare
Letter to J C Sturm
This Is How We Make a World
Tagaloa: The Order of Things
In the Beginning
Papatūānuku
Te Awa: Love Song for Manawatū
Matau Mana Moana
Mana
Ngatu
The Good Wife’s Prayer
Lonely
Readjusting Great Expectations
A Woman Scorned
The Unfaithful Heart of Her Quiet
Bruise
Terms of a Treaty
Enter Hot Man at an International Conference
Itinerary of Infidelity
summer, bed, awake, alone,
Let Me Tell You What I Remember
Whiro
Love Isn’t
The Good Wife’s Prayer
Hawai‘i Found
What the Students Said: O‘ahu 313
Tūtū Pele Intervenes
Our Generation: ‘Āina Aloha
Intergenerational Healing: Lessons from Hawai‘i
Anchoring the Cry from Within
Kūkaniloko
Demigods in Archetype City
Shark
Hina: Advice Column across the Ages
The Tale of Hina and Sinilau
Hina and Her Pool
Rupe/Lupe
What Trees Will Say
One Last Lifetime
Dry-docked
Wedding River Song
Is That a Sex Poem?
Go-betweens
Bloodshed
Carved on a Pou
You’ve written a lot of poems, he said
Odyssey in Black Sand
How to Break a Curse
Telling the Other Side of the Story
After Reading Ancestry
Son, for the Return Home
We Find Ourselves Statistics
Finding Our Way
Our Fears
Moemoeā
A Tongan Reflection on Tino Rangatiratanga
Tūhoe Boys
For Tamir, with Love from Aotearoa
Now THIS is Reverse Racism
For All My Sisters
Lost and Found
The Sounds of Princess Ashika
Spirited Leadership
Lost and Found
Poem for the Commonwealth, 2018
Kapihe’s Prophesy
Matariki: A Call to Kāinga
The Art of Walking in Dark Light
Te Korekore
Te Pō: The Dark Ages
Te Ao Mārama: The World of Light
Unbecoming
The Art of Walking in Dark Light
Goddess Muscle Meditation
Acknowledgements
Your People Will Gather Around You: Love after love
Your people
will gather around you.
Your family
who prepared
a place for you,
in a lineage
that connects you
all the way back
to the beginning.
A family
that dreamed you
possible.
It is their
soft singing,
cellular love songs,
the chanting lyric of bloodlines,
accompanying you
all the way
through the lonely.
The benefactors of your bones,
blood, and body.
Each is a love letter
folded in your DNA sequence.
With double-helix tongues
they whisper you
into your dreams.
Why you are here.
What you are meant to do.
Hoping you have ears
in your waking life
and eyes to see.
They call you to transform
the weft and warp
of what has been
woven before you.
To bring it back
into balance.
It is their magnetic pull
of molecule
that gathers all that is lost
and redirects your return
to centre.
Reorients you
to radiant nucleus.
Re-sourced.
So you can widen your circles
of compassion; travel beyond
your own limits, beyond almost
what you can bear.
Accompanied all the way.
Yes, this is the large, large,
ever-expanding loving
of everything
that has been the making of us.
Knowing itself
through you
and evolving.
Yes, your people
will hold fast within you.
In the marrow of your bones,
waiting to be known.
Travelling with you
along the soft breathing
curves of an infinite circle
that has no circumference,
and whose centre
is everywhere.
Ever so slowly,
all your people will gather around you,
the ones you realise, when you look in their eyes,
that you’ve known for a life cycle, or two,
who not only help you on your journey
to find home,
but who make it home,
this strange lonely journey,
who make it home as you travel it.
And then time will come
with great knowing,
when you will remember yourself
back to yourself.
Returning
to a memory
of wholeness.
E NGĀ
MATE,
HAERE,
HAERE,
HAERE
Malaga: The journey
(FOR ALICE SUISANA HUNT)
It is a spindrift
that rises from the body.
Our final exhale
beyond the breath,
where we give ourselves up
in completion
to life.
Where everything that you are
leaves behind
everything that you were.
Departing
that faithful friend
of the body.
Its soft limbs.
Its forgiving flesh.
Muscles, skin, sinews –
all that held you together –
so gently,
for so long.
A song
of water, blood,
breath and bone.
We acknowledge all
that you have left behind.
All that you have given.
And what a life you have seen,
and what a life you have been
and how we have loved you.
We stay here,
with that precious vessel
that carried you
through this life,
but cannot carry you
into the next.
And may we who loved you,
holding the song, blood and bone vessel
of your being,
may we carry the meaning
of your life forward
into the world of light,
so that it will reach
those who come after.
He waka herehere ngā waka.
The vessel that binds us
to the great moving fleet.
We know that it’s your time to depart,
to embark on an ancient route of return,
along the terrestrial contours of this land
that has birthed and fed you,
this land on which we stand,
towards a celestial flight path
beyond the wingspan of birds,
into the stars,
towards the warmer weather of our dreams,
towards islands we have held gently in our
memories,
where we once belonged.
At Te Rere
where two oceans meet,
a pōhutukawa tree still holds,
waiting for you
with a fragrant, green-leaved,
red-crowned,
farewell.
The whole earth heaves
a sigh of release.
And from here,
wreathed in red and green,
you will bid us farewell
and begin to travel the ocean roads.
The sea path traced by star walkers,
past Tongatapu, to ‘Uvea and Futuna,
where with the splitting of rocks, it all began.
You will enter the deep, blue channels
of ocean and night
and move between worlds
of underwater darkness and celestial light.
You will take flight.
Until you reach Savai‘i
and follow the black lava fields
towards the last rites.
Here, you will be cleansed
in the waters of Falealupo.
The final farewell at the seashore.
It is here we face that truth,
that you are westward-bound.
Ia Manuia Lou Malaga.
Blessed be your journey.
Follow the shining trail
of the setting sun
towards the great mystery
beyond all of our knowing.
We must trust then,
in all we cannot understand,
and like the land,
heave a heavy sigh of release.
O le mavaega nai le tai e fetaia‘i i i‘u o gafa.
The farewell at the seashore,
with the promise
to meet again in the children.
Oceania
(FOR EPELI HAU‘OFA)
Some days
I’ve been
on dry land
for too long
my ache
for ocean
so great
my eyes weep
waves
my mouth
mudflats
popping with
groping breath
of crabs
my throat
an estuary
salt crystallising
on the tip of my tongue
my veins
become
rivers that flow
straight out to sea
I call on the memory of water
and
I
am
starfish
in sea
buoyed by
lung balloons
and floating fat
I know the ocean
she loves me
her continuous blue body
holding even
my weight
flat on my back
I feel her
outstretched palms
legs wide open
a star in worship
a meditation as old as the tide
my arms, anemones
belly and breasts, sea jellies
Achilles fins, I become
free-swimming medusa
my hands touching
her blue curves
fingers tipping
spindrift
a star in worship
a wafer in her mouth
a five-pointed offering
she swirls
counter-clockwise
beneath me,
all goddess
all muscle, energy
power, pulse
oh, the simple faith
of the floating
letting go
in order to be held
by the body water of the world
some days
this love
is all I need
For Teresia TeaIwa
I am going to light a candle for you
e hoa, although at our age
candles should be for lovers
and shy bodies ushering in
trust,
or for mindfulness
at the end of a long
short-wick
of a working day.
Not for this.
He tangi oiaue.
I will light this candle.
The spendy kind,
cradled in glass,
that burns for days
smelling of coconut and vanilla
and I will say prayers for you
even though my prayers
are like bad poems
and are often wordless.
I hope,
at the least,
you will feel the
long-burning
flame of my intent,
warming the space
between us.
You are the first of us
‘young ones’ –
the OG feminist:
Dr Dusky Maiden,
who famously
cried salt-tears
and sweat ocean,
creating a wake
wide enough
for so many of us
who followed.
In the deep multicolour
of your wide, wonderful wake
I am thinking of a word: Huliau,
described to me once
by a Tongan artist,
but no Google search
reveals its meaning.
And as you well know,
the stuff really worth knowing
isn’t found on Google.
Although I see in Hawaiian,
huliau means climate
and sister –
climate changer
feels right to me.
We felt you
change
the climate Tere.
Daughter of Oceania,
ambiguously native,
kin somehow
to all of us.
(Even us polys,
while calling us out,
our volume,
and our
repetitive
raw fish.)
You are,
Maraea nailed it,
‘kaupapa as’ –
unafraid,
yet overburdened
with community service,
with marking
and mentoring
and doing all of this
and all of that,
with so much
determination
and good grace
it escalates
around you.
Contagious.
Although I for one
wish you had more time
to write poetry
and just sit, very quietly,
wherever you liked.
You are the reason
I sat with coconut cream
in my wild hair
on a wilder beach
in west Auckland,
with other curly girls
in a salt pool
in dark black sand.
You told me via story
that a tatau should never
point to your sex, giggling,
pointing to your paradox.
We were standing, at the time,
next to a replica moai,
but still, it was on a beach –
nobody can laugh at
that southern-most water
too cold to swim in.
And in Wellington,
in a sea of Palangis,
in the windy, wide-eyed dry,
I was thirsty for your stories
of tatau and French Polynesian authors
and an Oceania
more expansive than mine.
Shy admission: more than once
I caught my breath
with how much
there was to admire.
Diplomat: representing us overseas with your not-missing-a-beat articulate.
Truth teller: revealing and peeling off your skin
in front of students unaccustomed
to real,
in school assemblies
when in uniform.
Activist: in front of everyone
that little bit braver
than the rest of us.
You are
a voice,
a song,
a poem,
an essay,
a direct quote,
a protest sign,
a presence.
Beloved.
You are
my prayer.
Botled ocean
(FOR JIM VIVIEAERE)
i)
We shared a beer once.
A quiet conversation
that quickly moved
to what lurks beneath.
You showed me your work:
dark purples, subterranean colours,
images like bite marks into
the deep flesh of memory.
You-made-it-so-beautiful
