News at Eleven: Whereas a "poem of witness" of

the melodramatic sort would now go further into horror, [Wislawa] Szymborska's poem turns away from the dead child to show the bewildered tediousness of an interminable journey on foot through baffling foreign landscapes:

Always another wrong road ahead of them,
always another wrong bridge
across an oddly reddish river.

Even danger has become both sporadic and eternal:

Around them, some gunshots, now nearer, now farther away,
above them a plane seems to circle.

from The New York Review of Books: Staring Through the Stitches

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