Extract

On the day the world ends a bee circles a clover, a fisherman mends a glittering net.

A bee circles a clover, a fisherman mends a glimmering net, and the world ends not in fire but in the ordinary continuation of a Tuesday afternoon. Czeslaw Milosz wrote this poem in Warsaw in 1944, while the city was being methodically destroyed, and its quiet power lies in its refusal of apocalyptic spectacle. The end of the world, the poem insists, will look exactly like any other day, and only an old man, binding tomatoes in his garden, will recognize it. Milosz, drawing on biblical and folk traditions, understood that prophecy speaks most terribly when it whispers. The poem survives as a rebuke to every imagination that demands its catastrophes announced with trumpets rather than with the hum of bees.