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I Am Not a Man who Does Things

There are so many of you, men who do things,
everywhere in the streets, under the sky, roofs.
Only I am here purposeless, infamous.
only good for drowning in water.

But I am waiting, have been waiting for a long time
for some wholly good, wholly honest passerby to say to him:
Oh, don‘t turn and look at me,
Oh, don‘t condemn my immobility.
I grow among you, but shaded by my hands
the mystic fruit ripens in another place.
Don‘t curse me, don‘t curse me!

Friend of deep things,
companion of silence,
I play above the doing.
Sometimes with a flute of ancestral bone
I sens myself to death as a song.

Questioning, my brother looks at me,
astonished, my sister meets me,
but wrapped aroud my feet
the snake listens to me and understands me better,
the snake with its eyes open forever
to wisdom far away.

poem by Lucian Blaga from In the Great Passage (În marea trecere) (1924), translated by Roy MacGregor-Hastie
Added by Dan Costinaş
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