A poem by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, appearing in this week’s New York Review of Books:
“Vermeer”
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.
Emily Rutherford 