Mila - Goddess Muscle

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 7071, 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. 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 youve 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 NG
MATE, HAERE,
HAERE,
HAERE (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 ng waka. The vessel that binds us to the great moving fleet.

We know that its 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 Rerenga Wairua, where two oceans meet, a phutukawa 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 Savaii 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 fetaiai i iu o gafa. The farewell at the seashore, with the promise to meet again in the children. (FOR EPELI HAUOFA) Some days Ive 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 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 isnt 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.