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.