How Gods Love by Julienne Maui Castelo Mangawang
A sweeping poem about passed lives, missed connections, and finding one’s soulmate.
First published in 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, English Section on “Crossings,” Issue 72, in July 2023. Content warning: death.
From the author:
“How Gods Love” is a series of past lives where I crossed paths with my twin flame. These were uncovered during a retreat with Ayahuasca and other plant medicine. Call it cosmic coincidence but when we shared what we saw in our journeys, we were completing each other’s stories. We also found out we could have met earlier during university because he frequented the computer shop just in front of the gates. Aside from writing this poem as an answer to “Why am I here?” this has turned into a poem talking about our Karma and soul evolution.
for J
We were two four-leaf clovers hugging against the hurricane wiping out houses making holes out of our Eden. Our roots clung to Mother Gaia, asking her to shake the ground sending a message to the Universe: for us to be always together yet when they turned us human we were fossilized after the meteor our skeletons side by side, ancient bride and groom petrified by transition into another life where we almost met, sleeves touching by an inch a cause for our hearts to awaken before you left the computer shop and I was late for a class I’ve already forgotten how I was on adrenaline. Lifetimes ago you said you adored me with the sunrise on the beach but instead I ran away thinking it was all in my head, that was the only goodbye we had. Time stopped and rewinded that moment, only we both said I love you at the same time. In another life, you offered me tea and I watched you plow a field with the same force you used to carve our names out on the handle so whenever you felt like giving up you always read how our names sounded beautiful together the way we were beautiful in bed moments before they broke into your hut and they caught us in an embrace. We were reincarnated into another life, burned marks became birthmarks one on my thigh and one on your neck. As we lay down together, we both know how it would end if we accepted again what was never meant for us. We broke out and found each other’s light, not knowing we were taken apart for a god to descend to earth. We mirror our darkness and light, a brilliant completion of yin & yang, the flowing state of a river we have bathed and meditated in together. Oh, if possible we could have stayed there forever but forever is only a word invented by people who refuse endings. Someday, I will carry your child as you tell me you love me and we will know why it took many lifetimes before we began loving one another because all this time we are two halves of the same God mastering the rhythm of love.
Julienne Maui (Castelo Mangawang) is a Pleiadian Starseed who finished her MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines - Diliman. Her poems have appeared in TLDTD, Cordite Poetry Review, Novice Magazine, The Rumpus’s ENOUGH series, The Rising Phoenix Review, 聲韻詩刊 Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine and other places.
She is a Reiki practitioner, Access Bars practitioner, and plant medicine guide. She is a member of SEA Lit Circle. You may find her teaching, facilitating healing activities, connecting with plants, helping out at healing spaces, and raising the planet’s collective vibration.
Instagram: @t.hempressm
Substack: @juliennemaui
Tiktok: @juliennemaui
If you’d like to support the author, you can purchase her chapbook How Gods Love here.
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