Dumitru Matcovschi Poezii -

“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.”

Longing is not an illness. Longing is a root… The more you cut from the branch, the more the heart grows…

He handed her the book, opened to a different poem. She read the lines aloud:

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

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.

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.

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. Dumitru Matcovschi Poezii

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

“What do I tell them?” she asked.

It was the third well from the house—the old one, with the moss-eaten beam and the bucket that had worn a groove into the limestone rim over a hundred years. That was where her grandfather, Nicolae, went when the weight of the new world became too heavy. “The laws of the office change with every

Ana knew she would find him at the well.

Nicolae finally opened his eyes. They were the color of wet earth. He looked at the old bucket, at the initials carved into the wood— N.M., 1947 —the year he had dug this well with his own father, the year after the famine.

“The silence between the drops,” he said. Then he began to recite, not from the book, but from a place deeper inside him: Here, a mother washed her child’s face

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.