Everyone in Dave Bonta's «End times» is busy reading signs, and almost nobody is looking at what is in front of them. The speaker's community is convinced the sky is about to come undone and the world is about to fly "out of orbit." The poem gently dismantles that panic. By the end, a bent old woman tells them the disaster isn't up there at all. The real danger is "how we fail to bear witness / to whatever happens in each & every / holy, unstable moment."
The poem's humor arrives early. The "canting prophets" consult "the lint balls in their navels," a wonderfully deflating image: divination reduced to navel-gazing, the cosmic pulled down to pocket fluff. "Canting" does double work here. Cant is insincere, pious talk, and to cant also means to tilt, so these prophets are both phony and off balance. The repeated line, "We thought it was a sign" and then, more tersely, "We thought it a sign," shows the community's certainty hardening into reflex. The past tense also tells us they were wrong, or at least looking in the wrong place.
The middle of the poem is a pivot built around the word "but." The coffee is "becalmed in its cup," a sailor's word that makes a small domestic liquid into a becalmed ship, and traffic goes "gangling past," awkward and lanky, like something too ordinary to be doomed. The world is plainly carrying on. Yet the people have bolted their doors and windows "against the loud flocks / of grackles." The harsh *k* sounds of "flocks" and "grackles" seem to echo the birds' noisy racket, and the fear feels both absurd and physical. Then the imagery turns strange and beautiful: "An iridescent sea / broke across our lawns." The nautical thread continues, but the calm cup has become a wave of birds. Because the line breaks after "Black," the next line has to deliver "rainbows of wings," an oxymoron that captures how grackle feathers flash color against dark. A rainbow is traditionally a sign of promise, so this black one may be a sign turned inside out. Even so, it is only birds, and they are beautiful.
Notice who delivers the truth. Not a prophet but "an old woman, bent over her stick," with no name and no title. Her posture is the opposite of the prophets' grand skygazing: she is looking down, at the ground, where life actually happens. Her warning is plain speech, and the ampersand in "each & every" keeps it casual and handwritten, as if sanctity could be said in passing. The word choices in the final line are the poem's boldest: "holy" and "unstable" sit side by side. Every moment is sacred, and every moment is also on the verge of ending. In that sense the title's "end times" comes true constantly, which is exactly why we should pay attention.
Structurally, the poem is a single block of seventeen lines of free verse, with no rhyme and no steady meter. The sentences sprawl across line breaks ("the imminent / undoing of the sky"; "Black / rainbows"), which gives the voice a breathless, conversational momentum, as though the speaker were telling the story over the fence. The one question, "but what to make of the coffee…?", trails off without a question mark until the end of a long clause, and the confusion it describes is real. The final line slows the pace with its stresses, "holy, unstable moment," so the poem ends with a held breath.
What makes «End times» worth reading is how it turns the language of apocalypse against itself. We tend to imagine catastrophe as a spectacle arriving from the sky. The poem suggests that the more common catastrophe is quieter: a flock of birds is wonderful and we hide from it, a cup of coffee cools and we never taste it. By including itself in that "we," the poem makes the reader one of the people with bolted windows, which is why its last line lands with some force.