Transcendance

Never had two souls been so entwined:
her chronic anguish
maddened his nights and days for an eternity.
The hour finally dawned
when his heart could beat again as if sane,
loosed from the stranglehold of her arrhythmia.
Now, at last, she set him free.

The brutality of her warring years seem profligate now.
Her quiet, unrelenting violence -
forcing words into his mouth,
making him swallow them sideways
so they caught in his throat.
Her silent taunts of unbelief
and wordless blasphemy
never abated.
But they drew from him
only a pleading
“Nevertheless.”

A walking war zone,
she was a warren of misery:
her every thought a declaration of hostility,
each move a push towards the edge of the precipice.
She could not bring herself to believe
that he was all that he claimed to be.
So she continued with her carnage,
darkening his thoughts unbidden,
wreaking interminable hours of restlessness.
Yet to every onslaught he would look her in the eye,
and silently implore
“Even so.”

She never knew that his insomnia was fuelled
by his hunger for the return of her footfall
across the threshold of his heart.
He could not stop at recompense.
Endless gifts proffered tenderly,
one for each loss, each dream unfulfilled;
every offering exquisitely wrapped with longing,
and baited for joy.
She spurned them all.
Indifference - her charm defensive,
was the cruellest dismissal.

And still his faithful mantra was
“This, notwithstanding.”

He retaliated only with love.
He knew he had to vanquish her resistance
not by revenge,
but by surrender.
He could only abide with her,
face every unjust accusation
with no retort,
mutely allow each false charge
to lodge and wound.

His kingdom had been rocked
with the roar of her silence.
And all souls cowered
the day she pushed him
beyond the limits of his endurance,
and watched him hang there.
Yet still, he would not save himself.
He had leapt headlong
from glory to ignominy, just for her.

It was only in that ultimate moment
of his helplessness and wretched suspension,
that she saw he was not the enemy.
Then, in an instant,
all the years of acrimony
melted into nothing,
and the threads of realization
wove irrevocably into a
tapestry of exoneration.
She had no option but to acquiesce
that he had never betrayed her.

Shedding these layered misconceptions
of her troubled days,
she’d wept a bitter cocktail of grief and joy
to think how his faithfulness
had gone beyond the point of inconvenience:
It had broken off pieces of his heart
so she could be set free
from her own tyranny.

Now she comes willingly to the place
where he is enthroned as in the ancient days,
and wonders at his restoration
through her deliverance.
And his eyes, awash with unspeakable joy
at her homecoming,
receives at last
an oblation replete and bittersweet:
her whispered
“I am once again yours,
and you, forever mine.”