You've never seen angels, because angels come only after children fall asleep and leave before children start to open their eyes. Their eyelashes haven't opened yet, and the angels already have fled. Each child has an angel of his own that takes care of him when Mother sleeps, tired. But both Mother sleeps with one eye open, and the angel thoroughly guards the child. If there were no angels, children would forget to wake up and they wouldn't even dream nice things. Angels, at night, play with girls and boys; they cast magic spells on them and make them look into the sky, in the world of beautiful tales. For even in their sleep, children would be unhappy, if there would be no angels to guide them.
When night falls, first the flock comes, like pigeons, and afterwards God shows up, avoiding both sunlight and the light from the windows, where the man with the pen works. When God moves behind him, He smiles, and the man feels more animated by the unknown fragrance, both warm and cool, of God passing near the wall and the window.
How could the flowers open or the fruits ripen, if the angels and God didn't come every night and help men in their daily work? Angels come, cuddle children and go out in the fields and gardens, to blow on flowers, thus opening them. In the poppy flowers, there are always some bees, which hadn't the time to return to their apiary. They take them, without knowing it, just like children, back to their apiary, in the darkness. The angels need only the glitter of the stars from the sky. Do you know how many stars are in the sky? As many as the angels. The stars show every angel where he must return, after he has finished his work. Without their guidance, the angels would get confused in the darkness, and the sunlight would catch them on the earth; that would be very bad, because all of them would die and there would be no one to guide the children or to wake the blue flowers. Who would count the heartbeats of children? And who would mix so many grapes and group them in clusters, for children? An angel makes about four or five grapes per night, and without angels, the vineyards would turn wild.
Only once does it get worse, when, being too tired, the angels get in children's beds and sleep next to them. What happens is hard to say, but that's how a child dies. The angel forgets to count his heartbeats and to flip his wings, which keep the child alive until he wakes up. He loses count and falls asleep on his small and fragile heart, like a swallow, and crushes it. It is the angel's sentence to die – and the child dies too, who cannot live without an angel. Just as well, one of every kind of the flowers of the world dies: a lily-of-the-valley, a carnation and a white-petal eye, a chamomile...
by Tudor Arghezi (1880-1967)
