Every morning I
continue my evening prayer

and then I scatter
myself like a trunk cut off by the hands

of a blind and crazy
slave in several pieces,

which carry in their
yellow sap the smell of the earth.

Become thousands of
shards, unitas multiplex, the anonymous abbot

of a great
resurrection, and my shadow falls asleep,

as a tergal of
reconciliation, stretched over the domes of the cathedrals.

Below, on the
streets, some sell empty bottles and call me,

with the hands
pointing at me, at my shadow,

at my only entire
remaining part:

“Yet you are bone,
the helplessness and the glory, the nothingness

and the sublime
light are all, all there, in the whiteness of your bone.

Your lovely mother
can explain to you why your bone is white.

We know, it’s nicer
to rest or to die stuck in a cross,

but if you can not
die to the end

and your shadow will unheroic get cold, and it will fall upon us,

what are we going to
do? Don’t you think of us?”

From the wooden
shards like some scattered mirrors

on the ground, from
that shadow like a gray, giant, sick bird,

I answer them: “My
fear has never been sister

with death, has
never been my silence sister

with life. Stay with
me, stay with me, don’t

betray! After us
the butterflies will be getting poorer

and the flowers more
and more mothers of blame.”

Dragos Niculescu
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