In these poems, Karlo Mila speaks to the power of acknowledging one’s ancestral lineage. Drawing on metaphors of bone and blood, she explores the cosmological foundations that connect many generations and island cultures of Oceania across space and time. “Inside us the Dead (The New Zealand-born Version)” is a response to the eponymous poem written by senior statesman for the culture, Albert Wendt, and it honors the groundbreaking foundations he laid for future generations of young Pacific poets like herself. The poem is paired with this female image carved from the creamy core of a single polished whale tooth. These sacred objects were kept in specially constructed shrines or “god houses.” Almost exclusively female, the images represent female deities for whom the figures served as vaka, or vessels, in which the power of the divinity resided.
Excerpt from “Inside Us The Dead (The New Zealand-born Version)” by Karlo Mila
This blood
is a ripple
in an ocean
of our blood.
I am
the next wave
of a tide that has been coming
for a long time.
This vein
leads back to my bones.
“Poem for Winnie Laban” by Karlo Mila
It is a conversation
between ocean and history,
genealogy and bone.
It is a thin umbilical line through time that pulls us.
Reaching between destiny and memory.
