Whoever wants to paint the variegated world

Let him never look straight up at the sun

Or he will lose the memory of things he has seen.

Only burning tears will stay in his eyes.

Let him kneel down, lower his face into the grass,

And look at light reflected by the ground.

There he will find everything we have lost:

The stars and the roses, the dusks and the daws.

        - Czeslaw Milosz

           Warsaw, 1943