In the world to come the forests won’t have secrets.

Leaves will fall on soil made of leaves,

Stem, mud, sand, the usual substances

And everything that happens will be heard for miles:
Leaves rattling, trees falling, gunshots.

Only there will be no gunshots.

We are talking about the world to come.

And the people of Ponar will brush off the dirt

And return to the twenty-seven libraries

And sixty study halls of the Vilna synagogue

To run the gamut in their youth organizations

From right-wing Zionism to left-wing Zionism

And mimeograph avant-garde poetic tracts

On the beauty of the aspens at Ponar.

Mostly, they’ll learn Mishnah and Gemara

At the oversubscribed lectures of Rabbi Akivah,

Who, though he was slaughtered like a beast

In the marketplace, according to the Midrash,

Was not hindered in the world to come

From astounding even Moses with his insights.

Not just the rabbis and the rich will study,

But butchers, tailors, shoemakers, musicians;

The air itself, weighted down with ash,

Will rifle through the aspens’ skittish pages

For commentaries on the sacred texts

Derived from half-revealed illuminations

Long before they could be written down

Along with murals, stories, recipes,

Chemical formulae, dress patterns,

Melodramas, new prime numbers, poems

Crowded together in the rare, dark soil

That polishes the aspens’ tarnished silver

To prepare a setting for the alef-bet

Or perhaps to make each leaf a tiny mirror

To shine, in miniature, an unclaimed face

Dreaming calmly of the world to come

Until it fills with gold and falls again—

This time gently—to its waiting place

And rests its secrets in the cluttered earth

Shaded by the forest at Ponar.