Dumitru Matcovschi Poezii File

Then he handed the bucket to Ana.

Ana looked up. The delegation from Chișinău was waiting in the yard, men in clean shirts and polished shoes, holding clipboards and pens. They knew the price of everything and the value of nothing that couldn’t be digitized.

“The laws of the office change with every election,” he interrupted gently. “But the law of the well is older. It says: Here, someone once bent down to drink. Here, a mother washed her child’s face. Here, two lovers dropped a coin and made a wish. You cannot fill that in with gravel and cement.”

Ana listened. She heard the soft plink of a distant drip, the rustle of a poplar leaf, and the faint, endless hum of the summer heat. “The well?” she said. Dumitru Matcovschi Poezii

Ana knew she would find him at the well.

Ana knew the poem. The well is not given away… The well remains… For without the well, we wander lost through the world…

Longing is not an illness. Longing is a root… The more you cut from the branch, the more the heart grows… Then he handed the bucket to Ana

“The silence between the drops,” he said. Then he began to recite, not from the book, but from a place deeper inside him:

When she walked back to the house, she did not carry a message for the delegation. She carried the book. She would read them the poems herself. And if they did not understand, that was all right.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

She looked at the book in his hands. The cover was faded, the spine cracked. Dumitru Matcovschi’s face, stern and kind, stared out from the back. Her grandfather had carried this book through the last years of the Soviet Union, through the reawakening of the language, through the dusty days of independence and the hungry winter that followed.

She found him sitting on the low stone wall, a worn volume of Dumitru Matcovschi open in his hands. He wasn’t reading. He was listening.