Apocalypse usually arrives in films, with fire and collapsing skylines. In Mary F. C. Pratt's poem it arrives in a garden, a driveway and a well. The title's Greek root means "unveiling", and what gets unveiled here is not a single catastrophe but a pile-up of small losses that one anxious speaker cannot stop counting. The central idea is that environmental dread is not only about the distant, enormous future. It is something you live inside, in the middle of ordinary chores, and the poem asks what a person can honestly do with that feeling.
The form is built to feel like a mind that cannot settle. There are six tercets, all short-lined, with no rhyme and no regular beat. The speech is plain and conversational, the kind of thing you might say aloud while standing in a yard. The repeated "What if" is the engine of the poem. It opens the first stanza twice, then returns for the maples, the sky and the wells, so the reader feels the worry multiplying. Because nothing rhymes, no stanza closes with a satisfying click, and every question is left hanging.
The line breaks do much of the work. "What if the bees / are never coming back?" pauses on "the bees" before finishing the thought, so the loss is named before we learn how total it is. In "I can't begin / to pull it all", the line ends on the word "begin", and the sentence stalls at the exact point where the speaker admits she cannot start. The garlic mustard stanza is also the only one that is not a question at all. It is a flat report of a job that will never be finished, and it sounds more tired than frightened.
The imagery moves between the tiny and the planetary without warning. Bees, earthworms and maples are set side by side, and the line break in "the maple trees / and earthworms / move away?" gives the lowly worm a line of its own. The verb "move away" is also striking. It makes trees and worms sound like neighbours packing up a house, which is both gently comic and unsettling. Then the sky "becomes a plastic dome", an image of the whole world turned into something sealed and artificial, like a cheap greenhouse lid. The poem never explains this picture. It lets the strangeness stand.
The most telling shift comes in the line "I think the wars will never end." Everything else is a "What if", a possibility. Here the speaker moves to "I think", and fear hardens into belief. It is also the only fear in the poem that has nothing to do with nature, and it sits in the same stanza as the plastic sky. The poem seems to suggest that ecological worry and human cruelty feed the same sense of dread.
The next stanza turns the lens on the speaker herself. "I live in the country. / I have to drive everywhere." The sentence "I have to" is half excuse and half confession. She is not standing outside the problem pointing at it, because her own daily life is part of what she fears. The wells running dry then land as a practical, rural worry rather than a vague one.
The ending is what makes the poem memorable. Having listed the possible end of the world, the speaker says, "I'm making compost / out of everything. / I'm trying to write this poem." The two activities are quietly equated. Compost turns waste into soil, and the poem is trying to turn anxiety into something usable. The present-progressive verbs, "making" and "trying", keep the action unfinished, and "trying" admits that the poem may not succeed. There is no rescue here and no speech about hope. Instead there is a small, stubborn act of tending.
That honesty is what gives the poem its significance. It does not pretend that composting or poetry can reverse a collapse, but it also refuses to give up. For a reader, the effect is recognition. Many people feel at once that the problem is too big to begin on and that sitting still is impossible. Pratt shows a mind holding both feelings in short, plain lines, and she ends on the effort rather than the outcome.