For Mauna a Wākea
May 2020
It’s been 300 days since I first laid in your arms
First felt the chill of your kiss on my skin
You brought me to the thin line between life and death
Between frostbite and heat exhaustion
You taught me balance
Patience
Compassion
And when you stretched your arms around us
You taught us safety
What it meant to create security with our own bodies
Voices
So for you
I am every child who imagined someday you’d be free
I am every prayer laid at your feet
These days
I am hundreds of miles away
But you still visit me in my dreams
We share ceremony with Niolopua
And in that realm
You keep all my secrets
All my fears
All I am too afraid or ashamed to say out loud
For my fellow kiaʻi
It’s been 300 days since we marked the boundaries
Lined our jurisdictions with the trembling tenor of our collective voice
Since we began to feed each other
In food
In spirit
In care
For you
I am everything that cannot be broken
I am your first pinky promise
I am the incoming swell
I am every bit of love you taught me to lay at her feet
I am songs between stories, between tears
I am the water we fought to protect
That we shared
Together
In the bitter cold of night
When we worried
No one else was coming
Copyright © 2022 by Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 6, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is a part of a series entitled ‘Love Poems in the Malu of Mauna a Wākea.’ They were all written while living, fighting, and struggling beside my lāhui under the unwavering aloha and protection of our Mauna in the summer and fall of 2019. After a nearly three-year hiatus from writing, these poems (and others) emerged as urgently and swiftly as our lāhui Kākana grew in the early days of the Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu. Like many others, I lived in a constant state of aloha and inspiration in those days as we marked the palena of our puʻuhonua, chained ourselves to cattle guards, watched our kūpuna get hauled away by law enforcement, and stood side by side making islands of protection out of our bodies. It is from this grand demonstration of aloha ʻāina that these poems were born.”
—Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio
Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio
Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli poet and the author of Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). A 2022–23 Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellow, she is an assistant professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.