How? Poem by Abraham Sutzkever

How and with what will you fill
Your goblet on the day of Liberation?
In your joy, are you ready to feel
The dark scream of your past
Where skulls of days congeal
In a bottomless pit?

You will look for a key to fit
Your jammed locks.
Like bread you will bite the streets
And think: better the past.
And time will drill you quietly
Like a cricket caught in a fist.

And your memory will be like
An old buried city.
Your eternal gaze will crawl
Like a mole, like a mole —

Vilna Ghetto, February 14, 1943