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,

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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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