The 155th Sonnet

Shakespeare's Macbeth was in my syllabus when I was in secondary school. But Macbeth was just an appetiser, for I went on to get the complete works of his. But it was as I was reading his sonnets that I tried to mimic his 14-line poems. The rest is history.
I did not read Shakespeare; I encountered him. In my "mimicking" of his sonnets, I learnt that a word could be stretched from its primary meaning to other "shades" of meaning.
Poetry to me is like a pilgrimage, a path of mystery, a ritual that can transport the poet from where he is to where the subject of his writing is, where he achieves a lived experience.
I deliberately chose a rhyming scheme of AABB CDCD EEFF GG, with which I wish to import an African voice into the sacred art of sonnet writing.