A Meeting with His Majesty, Mihai Eminescu Codrut Berceanu

          What did the hand that worked hard for the poem "The Evening Star" look like ? The hand that taught us to copy each verse at least ten times and to strike it out at least twenty times, until we consider it worth sharing with the entire world. And if I close my eyes, although I have never heard him, I seem to distinguish his voice "from hundreds of masts..." preserved in the syntax of his poems, in the flavour of his words - harmony and precision -. 

           I have seen Eminescu framed by the Carpathians Mountains in my classroom. And he himself looks like a
mountain born in the field of the Romanian poetry.  And once, without anybody seeing me, as I stood up on tiptoe, I 
touched, with the palm of my hand, the forehead "like the white cherry-tree flower" of the lonesome and young master of the Romanian language. It was just one moment in its uniqueness, in it s stillness, "when the swan flows on the lake" and the oxen gather up there. 

         Do you know that every year, as I wait for the first snow, I prepare myself for the meeting with his majesty
Eminescu as if for a painfully dear celebration ? And if he came, I would greet him in Alba Iulia's Cathedral of the 
Reunion of the Nation, with all the candles burning, accompanied by the ample sound of the organ, on a white winter day. We would light torches and celebrate with clear wine from ancient times. The clocks would cease for one moment their ticking, the hourglasses would be petrified, forgetting to pour dark rings like the signet rings on the rulers' fingers. 

         I am waiting for him and I have searched for him everywhere, in all seasons, in the old poplars, in the taste of the
strawberry after the rain, and especially in the acacia flower. My eye - witnesses are both the moon and the linden tree in blossom. As years pass by, it is my destiny to look for him in centuries of immortality in Iasi, Chisinau, Bucharest , Botosani or in Vienna or Berlin or for away from the light of the big cities in the "forest at the spring which is shaking on the gravel". But w e carry him within us and I carry him in my name with vegetal resonance: "forest, little forest" ("forest" is the English word for the Roumain "codru"). It is snowing as the holidays are approaching. 

        We seem to be preparing ourselves to welcome Eminescu. It is the time of our people's customs when the soul
clears itself of its roughness. On the eave of the houses the icicles are shining. The moon is sot and the Magi come
to the gate of the night. I am leaving the door open to God.