These are eight lines, among the best known of José Martí. The speaker grows a white rose — «in July as in January» — for the true friend who gives him his hand. And in the second half comes the turn that makes the poem great: for the cruel one too, who tears out the heart with which he lives, he grows neither a thistle nor a nettle, but the same white rose.
It is a whole ethics in one image: not to pay evil with evil. Like all of the Versos sencillos, it is written in octosyllabic quatrains, the measure of popular song, so that it may be remembered and sung. Martí died in battle four years later, for the independence of Cuba.
The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.