Dante encounters Beatrice 'neath Carnival skies.
At once he was smitten. She rolls both her eyes.
He sees her again at a gala that night.
She turned at his greeting and vanished from sight.
Dante finds her next morning, convinced it’s his day,
She spots him approaching and crosses away.
He skulks a moment, then cries out a plea.
Beatrice turns on her heel - “Are you following me?”
Dante halts, looks skyward, downplays his desire,
his heart no less lit with unwavering fire.
He freezes a moment, then offers a shrug,
“I merely stalk the piazza, like so many a bug."
Dante waits, feigns confusion, as if led astray,
then shadows her steps in far less subtle a way.
He trails her home with a bouquet in tow,
hopeful that flowers might soften an entreatious blow.
Dante approaches her house a confident man,
knocks thrice on her door with his blooms and a plan.
The door creaks open, Bea's glare cold and stern,
he thrusts out the flowers, to naught but a sigh in return.
He clears his throat loudly, preparing to speak,
But Bea cuts him off - “ceci n'est pas une comique.”
No lapse into Occitan will dissuade a man of such letters,
Dante's intent to woo her is no less unfettered.
Sensing this too, and her patience wrung dry,
"Abandon all hope" is Bea's parting reply.
She shuts the door with a definite slam.
Dante nods to himself – "All proceeds as God plans."
"I'll wait," through the timber he vows. "'Til your coldness relents."
Ignoring entirely what her response truly meant.
“I’ll wait,” Dante murmurs, "'Til fate turns your key.”
He stands there in place like a lovestruck oak tree.
"I'll wait," he yells, "through the turning of spheres."
"Even need I wait here for two-thousand years!"
“I’ve been to Hell and back!” he shouts at her door.
Over the transom she answers, “Then kindly return there once more.”
Dante, undaunted, waits all day in hopeful suspense,
stoically porch-bound with romantic pretense.
He stands there for hours, unshaken, unmoved,
as though through persistence alone might his faith be well proved.
When at last, in the evening, the hinges concede.
Beatrice appears in the doorframe, though with visible heed.
By most Florentines' standards, her costume austere,
Dante rather hears seraphs assembling near.
As she looks on her suitor with a skepitcal gaze,
Dante is just as soon lost in a beatified haze.
He again offers the blossoms - now dry, wilted, and sparse.
Another resolute no. But emerged again have the stars.