Dumitru Matcovschi Poezii -

“What do I tell them?” she asked.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

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.

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

“They want to pave the path to the new well,” Ana said. “And fill this one in. It’s a safety hazard, they say.”

“Matcovschi wrote,” he said slowly, “that a man without a village is a man without a shadow. And a village without its wells is just a map.” He closed the book. “Tell them the well stays.”

“Tell them,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “that Dumitru Matcovschi said: ‘The one who drinks from his own well is never a stranger in his own land.’ ” “What do I tell them

“Bunicule,” she said softly, sitting beside him. “The delegation from Chișinău is here. They want to talk about the land registry. About the EU grant.”

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.

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

Nicolae did not look up. He turned a page, though his eyes were closed.

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.

The well would remain. The root would hold. The heart would grow.

“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.”