Poem for Today

 

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.

- Heinrich Heine 

 

 

A pine tree towers lonely
In the north, on a barren height.
He's drowsy; ice and snowdrift
quilt him in covers of white.

He dreams about a palm tree
That, far in the East alone,
Looks down in silent sorrow
From her cliff of blazing stone.



Translated by Aaron Kramer, in: The Poetry of Heinrich Heine, ed. Frederic Ewen (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1969, p. 74).