My Aumakua

My Aumakūa is a poetic, mythic memoir of a man carried into the ocean and into himself. In these long, tidal stanzas, Paul ÓLaoghaire recounts a true encounter with the creatures of the deep—dolphins, manta rays, tuna, humpbacks, and the shark who marks him and transforms him. What begins as a swim becomes a ceremony. What begins as danger becomes initiation. Told with calm clarity and reverence, this work moves through immersion, rupture, rescue, and return, revealing a worldview shaped by kinship with the sea and the ancestral presence that rises from it. The poem honors Hawaiian cosmology without claiming it, instead offering a lived moment of connection where the boundary between human and ocean dissolves. My Aumakūa is both testimony and chant—a story of being seen, carried, and changed by the living ocean.