I ache from a love undying yet unrequited
The excruciating pain to none can be equated
An attempt to cry yields an endless groan
Its reverberations tumultuous to be mine own.
Let this paper be, then, my elocution
A liaison that pleads for an end to this tribulation
For Miss Jawb I’ve composed love songs, and poems too
And written a myriad a billet-doux
I’ve typed and sent gigabytes of electronic mails
And trod through labyrinths and impassable trails
It is a lustrum now since I began courting her
Yet she avoids me like the plague and waves from afar!
My friends and relatives too wish she would be mine
Though we all know not the plans of the powers divine
“You aren’t trying hard enough,” my father says
“God kindly let him get her,” my mother prays.
My uncles and aunts claim that I am lazy
My siblings and cousins think that I am choosy
Her father dismisses me as inexperienced and young
Her selfish, ethnocentric mama advises me to go hang.
The sisters assert I be patient- they’ll woo her for me
But the brothers object saying, “nothing goes for free”
Her nanny promises me the entire world’s sweetest honey
Only if I give her some ‘hand-oiling’ money.
To many a suitor’s pleads Miss Jawb has conceded
Yet she disdains I who wills to be diligently devoted
She excuses herself as endogamous and tells me, “never”
Yet the desultoriness of my kinsmen is in her favour
Recently she gave me a wan smile, kissed me and I thought ’twas my turn
But then she brushed me by with a full spurn!
Now I think that this love I claim to be denied me
Was destined to never be.