A Vision of the End

I once beheld the end of time!
   Its stream had ceased to be.
The drifting years, all soiled with crime,
   Lay in the filthy sea.

The prospect o’er the recking waste
   Was plain from where I stood.
From shore to shore the wreckage faced
   The surface of the flood.

There all that men were wont to prize
   When time was flowing on,
Seemed here to sink and there to rise
   In formless ruin blown.

In slimy undulations rolied
   The glory of the brave;
The scholar’s fame, the rich man’s gold,
   Alike were on the wave.

There government, a monstrous form
   (The sea groaned ’neath the load),
A helpless mass blown by the storm,
   On grimy billows rode.

The bodies of great syndicates
   And corporations, trusts,
Proud combinations, and e’en states
   All beasts of savage lusts.

With all the monsters ever bred
   In civilization’s womb,
Lay scattered, floating, dead,
   Throughout that liquid tomb.

It was the reign of general death,
   Wide as the sweep of eye,
Save two vile ghosts that still drew breath
   Because they could not die.

Ambition climbed above the waves
   From wreck to wreck he strove;
And as they sank to watery graves,
   He on to glory rode.

And there was Greed—immortal Greed—
   Just from the shores of time.
Of all hell’s hosts he took the lead,
   A monarch of the slime.

He neither sank below, nor rose
   Above the brewing flood;
But swam full length, down to his nose,
   And steered where’er he would.

Whatever wreckage met his snout
   He swallowed promptly down—
Or floating empire, or redoubt,
   Or drifting heathen town.

And yet, it seemed in all that steaming waste
There nothing so much gratified his taste
As foetid oil in subterranean tanks,
And cliffs of coal untouched in nature’s banks,
Or bits of land where cities might be built,
As foraging plats for vileness and guilt;
Or fields of asphalt, soft as fluent salve
Or anything the Indian asked to have.

I once beheld the end of time!
   Its stream had run away;
The years all drifted down in slime,
   In filth dishonored lay.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 19, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“A Vision of the End” first appeared in the Indian Chieftain (August 3, 1899). In The Cambridge History of Native American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Robert Dale Parker, professor of English and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois, writes, “Indeed, in terms not always pointed to conflict between Indians and whites, [nineteenth-century Indigenous poems] often take a broadly oppositional stance, protesting cultural habits and assumptions that came to dominate American culture, perhaps afflicting Indians especially, but also burdening the nation at large.[. . .] At the end of the century, Too-qua-stee’s ‘A Vision of the End’ offers a scathing, almost Swiftian vision of catastrophe [. . .]. Rather than representing the end of time himself, as yet another in the long, stock series of terminal Mohicans vanishing into the western horizon, Too-qua-stee looks down on the devastation of the world, especially the white world, and pronounces on it.”