A Song on the End of the World by Czesław Miłosz (1944)

A bee circles a clover and a fisherman mends his glimmering net, the way they would on any ordinary morning. This is the day the world ends, and Miłosz refuses it every sign we were promised: no thunder, no archangel's trumpet, no lightning to split the sky. There are only women under bright umbrellas and a drunkard growing sleepy at the edge of a lawn, and no one believes it is happening now. He wrote it in occupied Warsaw in 1944, while the world he knew was in fact burning around him, and the poem holds a terrible, quiet certainty: the apocalypse asks for no theatre, because it will look exactly like this, like nothing at all. At the end an old man who could have been a prophet kneels in his garden binding up tomatoes, and what he says, without once looking up, is the calmest and most frightening sentence ever written about the end of everything.