The title promises thunder. "End times" is the language of prophecy and panic, of trumpets and signs in the sky. What Dave Bonta gives us instead is eight short lines of near-domestic quiet: a reader, a river, an evening. The gap between the loud title and the hushed poem is where the meaning sits. Books have warned the speaker about the end, and the real worry turns out not to be the end at all but the long stretch of time that refuses to finish.
That turn comes in the second couplet, hinged on the small word "but." "My books spoke to me / about the end" sets up a familiar scene, the well-read person absorbing warnings, and the verb "spoke" gives the books a voice that is almost prophetic. Then: "but I fear I shall have / a great deal of evening." What is feared is not darkness but the slow hour before it. "A great deal of" is the language of quantity, as if evening were a possession handed over in excess. The line break after "have" lets the sentence hang for a moment, so that "have" briefly sounds like a verb of burden before the soft, slow word "evening" arrives. "Shall" adds an old-fashioned formality, and the speaker sounds composed even while afraid.
The third couplet is the strangest and most open: "the hooks are gone / out of the river." Hooks suggest fishing, the tools we use to pull something up out of moving water. If the river is time, or the flow of events, then the hooks might be whatever once let us catch hold of it: deadlines, purposes, the feeling that something is about to bite. Their absence could be a relief, with nothing barbed in the current, or a loss, with no way left to land anything. The poem refuses to choose. There is also a quiet pun in "gone out." Lights and fires go out, and this comes right after "evening," so the phrase carries a hint of dwindling light without ever naming it.
The final couplet turns toward the future: "I expect some new time / to make myself a wish." The speaker says "expect," not "hope," a flat, patient verb closer to waiting for a bus than for a miracle. "Some new time" is deliberately vague, with no date and no description. That vagueness feels honest, since nobody knows what follows an ending that never quite arrived. Yet the last line is quietly active. We usually make a wish on a star, or have it granted by someone else, but here the wish is made by the self, for the self. Follow the pronouns and you see a journey. The poem begins with "my books" and "to me," where the speaker is on the receiving end of other people's words, and finishes with "myself," where the speaker becomes the maker. The m-sounds of "my," "me," "make" and "myself" bracket the poem and underline the shift from listener to author.
Formally, everything is pared back. There are four unrhymed couplets, no punctuation, no capital letters, and lines of roughly four to six syllables. There is no regular meter. The rhythm is that of speech slowed down, with each line break working like a breath. Without full stops, the poem never delivers a firm ending, which suits a poem about an end that fails to close. Each couplet is a thought that could stand alone, so they sit side by side like objects on a shelf, and the reader has to supply the connections. That openness is part of the poem's charm. It trusts us to hear the link between fading light, an emptied river and a wish not yet made.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes the biggest, noisiest theme available, the end of everything, and treats it with understatement, shifting the focus from catastrophe to aftermath. A reader today may recognise the mood: the sense of living in an extended dusk, where grand conclusions do not arrive on schedule and the harder question is how to go on. The poem offers neither consolation nor despair. It settles on a modest, stubborn readiness, and it suggests that facing "a great deal of evening" may demand more imagination than facing the end itself.