Here’s a translation of one of the poems shared during our recent poetry evening.

Pine tree

Here I will never hear the cuckoo’s cry.
Here the tree will not wear a snowy turban,
But in the shade of these pines
My whole childhood is revived.

The rustling of the needles has been and gone;
I will call “Homeland” to a snowy wilderness,
To the greenish ice enclosing a mountain stream,
To the lyrics of a song in a foreign land.

I remember those snow-capped mountains
And a song on F.M.93
Oh my darling, I have grown with you
But my roots… on both sides of the sea.

Perhaps only the migrating birds can know,
When they’re suspended between earth and heaven,
This pain of the two homelands.

With you I have been planted twice.
With you I have grown, pines.
And my roots are in two different landscapes.

Lyrics: Leah Goldberg (1911 – 1970)
Music and middle verse in English: Achinoam Nini (Noa), September 1993
Translated by Eyal Azulay from the original Hebrew version