Five short lines, and the whole tragedy is over before the reader has settled in. Nausha Ameen's "untouchable love" is about two people who want the same thing and cannot have it. It works in two stages. First it states the situation plainly: her love is "eternal," he is waiting for her to "come soon," and they are "destined to be separate." Then it hands all the feeling over to one image: "He was the wolf / She was the moon."
The central idea is that love can be real on both sides and still impossible. Nothing in the poem blames anyone. There is no quarrel, no rival, no betrayal, only the word "destined," which removes every cause except fate. That is why the metaphor fits so well. A wolf and the moon are not enemies. They simply belong to different worlds, one earthbound and wild, the other bright and far above. The distance between them is not a failure of feeling but a fact of what they are.
The construction supports this. The first three lines are long and flat, close to ordinary speech, running from roughly eight to ten syllables. The last two shrink to four syllables each and repeat the same frame: "He was," "She was." The sudden shortening feels like a held breath, or a door closing. The matching grammar sets the two figures side by side in a balanced pair, yet the meaning says they can never be together. The form is symmetrical and the situation is not.
The rhyme works in the same way. Only "soon" and "moon" rhyme. The other line endings, "eternal" and "separate," are left unanswered, so the one rhyme is saved for the final word and lands with a click. It is also worth noticing that "soon" is the word he is hoping for, a word about time and arrival, and it rhymes with "moon," the thing that never arrives. Even the rhyming words are held apart by two lines. Sound brings together what sense keeps separate, and the only place the two sides meet is in the music of the poem.
The imagery does the most. The poem never mentions howling, and it doesn't need to, because the picture of a wolf with its head raised to the moon is familiar enough that readers supply it themselves. The wolf is solitary and earthbound. The moon is cold, luminous and visible almost every night, which is the cruelty of it. She can be seen but not reached. The word "untouchable" appears only in the title and is never repeated in the poem, because the moon makes the point without it. The moon also rises, wanes and returns, so "eternal" and "come soon" sit comfortably beside it. She does come, night after night, but coming into view is not the same as arriving.
Small word choices add to the effect. "Kept waiting" suggests a habit, something repeated long after hope should have run out. "Was" in "Her love for him was eternal" is slightly puzzling. It could just be the past tense of storytelling, but it could also hint that the story is already finished. The poem doesn't say, and that gap invites the reader to decide. The tone is also very calm. There are no exclamation marks and no words for pain, so the poem sounds less like a complaint than like a legend being retold, with an acceptance of fate that makes it sadder.
A fair question for discussion is whether the opening lines earn their place. "Eternal" and "destined" are big abstract words, and they are stated rather than shown. The last two lines, by contrast, are concrete nouns, and that is where the poem comes alive. One way to read this is that the poem moves from claiming an idea to proving it. The first three lines tell us the love is impossible, and the wolf and the moon make us feel it.
Its significance lies in that economy. It takes a well-worn pairing and compresses a whole story of longing into a closing image, with no moral and no consolation. For students it is a useful small example of how a poem can make an abstract idea, impossible love, felt through a single picture, and of how rhyme, line length and repetition can carry meaning as well as the words themselves.