mele

The author of the mele was a Hawaiian named John Meha, who died some years ago.

Unwritten Literature of Hawaii The Sacred Songs of the Hula Nathaniel Bright Emerson 1877

-- The composer of the music and the author of the mele was a Hawaiian named John Meha, of the Hawaiian Band, who died some ten years ago, at the age of 40 years.

Unwritten Literature of Hawaii The Sacred Songs of the Hula Nathaniel Bright Emerson 1877

Some parts of this mele, which is a love-song, have defied the author's most strenuous efforts to penetrate their deeper meaning.

Unwritten Literature of Hawaii The Sacred Songs of the Hula Nathaniel Bright Emerson 1877

_poo-pua'a_, leader of the olapa, calls the mele (_kahea i ka mele_) -- that is, he begins its recitation -- in a tone differing but little from that of ordinary conversation, a sing-song recitation, a vocalization less stilted and less punctilious than that usually employed in the utterance of the oli or mele.

Unwritten Literature of Hawaii The Sacred Songs of the Hula Nathaniel Bright Emerson 1877

"The priest Eoppo sang a long mele about Kahekili's mother and his mother's mother, and all their mothers all the way back to the beginning of time," Kumuhana resumed.

THE BONES OF KAHEKILI 2010

Barefooted, with no adornment of femininity, clad in a shapeless shift of much-washed cotton, with age-withered face and labour-gnarled hands, she cringed before him and crooned a mele in his honour, and, still cringing, put the lei around his neck.

SHIN-BONES 2010

Hawaiian mumbling and chanting a toothless mele of Bella and

ON THE MAKALOA MAT 2010

He did not know me, and when Ahuna told him who I was, he grovelled at my feet, almost clasping them, and mumbled a mele of all my line out of a lipless mouth.

SHIN-BONES 2010

And while she chanted her mele, the old crone's shrewd fingers lomied or massaged Bella's silk-stockinged legs from ankle and calf to knee and thigh.

ON THE MAKALOA MAT 2010

Both Bella's and Martha's eyes were luminous-moist, as the old retainer repeated the lomi and the mele to Martha, and as they talked with her in the ancient tongue and asked the immemorial questions about her health and age and great-great-grandchildren — she who had lomied them as babies in the great house at Kilohana, as her ancestresses had lomied their ancestresses back through the unnumbered generations.

ON THE MAKALOA MAT 2010