Perhaps only migrating birds know

 So Passover is next week and with it on my mind this poem takes hold of me, and as I hum the lyrics I wonder if I can find a translation to English and here it is (the wonders of the Internet). I compare the two versions and ultimately decide that the original Hebrew one is much better, and yet I think the mood is coming across. I also think that it has been a long time since I thought about the storks who showed up every spring in the sky above our town. They brought the message of the coming spring, and unknown lands, and freedom.
 

PINE

Here I will not hear the voice of the cuckoo.
Here the tree will not wear a cape of snow.
But it is here in the shade of these pines
my whole childhood reawakens.

The chime of the needles: Once upon a time –
I called the snow-space homeland,
and the green ice at the river's edge -
was the poem's grammar in a foreign place.

Perhaps only migrating birds know -
suspended between earth and sky -
the heartache of two homelands.

With you I was transplanted twice,
with you, pine trees, I grew -
roots in two disparate landscapes.

 

Lea Godberg – Israel. 1970