The poet Esther Shumiatcher Hirschbein was born in Belarus in 1899 and after many travels settled in Los Angeles in 1940. I was introduced to her via a translation of her 1956 poem Summer Awakening that appeared in the Forverts in 2021. A pshut shtikl ayzen (אַ פּשוּט שטיקל אײזן) is from the same 1956 collection, Lider (לידער). This is my own translation:

An unglowing piece of iron,
Burns like the sun in the desert;
Blooms like a cactus flower,
And like all the colored stones,
In the rays of the sun.
My plain piece of iron —
What joys do I learn from it?
Blood is the fire of life.
The sun is life alone.
Grass, with its green aspirations,
Is beauty for itself alone.