The exchanges of words built by a love so sublime

of two people placed and locked in quondam time;

love seemingly capturing you both by such surprise,

caught by shock …Suddenly!… I can only surmise.

In any other time and place, under another circumstance…

If things were even a bit different…what a splendid dance!

Yet had that been the case,

would you now be in my space?

Would you then be speaking to me of this difficulty?

Unknowingly provoking profound emotional faculty!

Had it just been so run of the mill—

falling in love and having your fill—

would you catch so many gazing eyes,

asking their human hearts to recognize

the difficulty of the complexity of being

human, one to one, supple hearts beating?

---

This story that I read, of you two,

renders the concept of Love anew.

Love is not bound by signed contract and written pledge,

or bound tightly by the unyielding thread of its selvedge.

Love refuses cessation in its fervent active liquidity,

flowing where it will and can with liquid rapidity—

never stopping, never ceasing,

always growing, always increasing.

(Like a mother bearing into life not one child but two

her love did not split and halve but doubled and grew.)

Love is more than a choice, and seizes us sudden,

ignoring our blind-eyes and claims of “forbidden!”

There is no way that Love as a force can be hemmed in,

not even by vows uttered within marriage’s fencing-in.

Through you two I see that love renders us utterly human,

unable to control and choose where love anchors in union.

---

There’s so little that I get to know

of the depth of the dialogue, the low

of frustration of burgeoning isolation

in the small distance of separation

existing between two bodies of flesh,

never to mingle, never to mesh.

The ache of desire streaming out from your heart,

taking what you had—could get—but still, the smart

of the pain of that ever very small distance

erecting profound walls enforcing resistance…

But again, there’s so little I can know about

what happened in the times not written out…

did the ethic of love you two crafted and wrote down

keep in place—holding—when you were out of town?

Please forgive my audacity of this intrusive interrogation;

it’s not mine to voyeuristically solve the remnant equation.

---

I know more the emotional trials and tribulations he went through,

but little I’m given of the extent of what his decisions did to you.

The idea, his mostly, dropped as from divine lip,

and into it assumed you would simply fit and slip.

Dictums masquerading as choices for your consent…

Never minding the environment of potential discontent?

The threat of loss, of heart broken, his presence never again held…

reduced apparent selections to one, options were withheld.

When in love one does what one has to do to stay near

to the one whom one loves and considers so dear.

How often did your heart secretly confess in the middle of the night

that none of this was the way it should be, that you should take flight?

Did you ever script a “Dear Karl” letter only to tear it from piece to piece?

Did you muster courage for “Goodbye” but stumbled over the first griece?

Love’s great venomous bite renders hearts, minds, and bodies paralyzed,

forcing yield to the warm toxin flowing causing action to be unrealized.

---

Navigating the path you walked—trying again and again to make the best

of a situation that shouldn’t have been but yet it was…the distinctest—

was never going to be without great discomfort for all three hearts involved.

(She Loved him, he loved her and Loved you, you Loved him, nothing solved.)

Not to mention the tension and frustration existing between Nelly and you,

even in times of relative ease and tranquility, the triangle would never do.

My modern eyes gaze upon her situation and swear she should have just

left him, packed up, moved, walked on claiming new ground to readjust

and be with one who could love her in the way she so deserved

rather than sit and watch him keep his love only for you reserved.

But it is unfair of me to cast such an out of context gaze and sling

my hypothetical expectations for a woman of whom I know nothing.

I wonder about those momentary quiet times between you and her,

how often you saw—deep within—the pain she had to quietly endure.

You were the chosen one, the desired, the beloved,

and she the left, the deserted, haunted with unloved.

---

So many roam the earth swept by the wind of love’s door reclose’

even those wedded and coupled feel that lonely and cold repose.

But you had that true love, the stuff of wishes and prayers, dream and desire

The kind of love that ignites all the senses, sets the entire body ablaze like fire.

You were never his worst mistake, his regret, and never his shame;

you were his joy, his pleasure and love, in substance and in name.

The two of you stumbled into something of profound transcendence

the divine substance poured out through Love’s supreme eminence.

The ease you moved about each other, the fluidity of words

spilled forth, the vibrant energy between each body towards

the other, and the depth of comfort with each other you both found

is the divine knot of love’s string tying hearts together forever bound.

Even if these meager lines are styled so simplistically,

organized and written to you, Charlotte, anachronistically,

I want to (wish to?) say thank you for your humble witness

to Love’s rupture drawing us in to its radical subversiveness.

---

Inspired by Christiane Tietz’s biography, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict.