Most poems about a pilgrimage head straight for the cathedral. Dave Bonta's three short stanzas do the opposite: what survives in the speaker's memory is a stone horse, a lacemaker and a few things in the road. The title, "On the Way to Santiago, 1978," places the journey on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, and the opening words, "I remember," tell us we are getting recollection, not reportage. Judging by the text, the poem is less about arriving than about what a traveler notices on the way, and what that reveals.
The first stanza is the most startling. "The Moorkiller's / stone horse in Logroño" seems to point to Santiago Matamoros, St James the Moor-slayer, the warrior saint of the pilgrimage tradition. Bonta never names him, and the bare epithet "Moorkiller" strips away the halo and leaves only the violence. Then comes the blunt third line, "its terrible phallus." "Terrible" is doing two jobs. It can mean "awful," but it also keeps its older sense of awe-inspiring. The sculpture's swagger is comic and menacing at once, and the speaker is plainly unable to forget it. The sounds help: the hard k of "Moorkiller's," the heavy double stress of "stone horse," and then the short line that ends the stanza like a slammed door.
The second stanza turns from aggression to penance. Pilgrims "once bloodied" the steps "with their knees," a strange, precise phrase in which the knees become the tools of the bloodying. Having just seen the saint as a conqueror on horseback, we now see the faithful on their knees. Then the stanza swerves again: "the jolly lacemaker." It is a fragment with no verb, set down beside the blood the way memory sets things side by side, without comment. "Jolly" is a small, bright, almost cheeky word after "bloodied." The lacemaker's delicate handwork also makes a quiet contrast with the horse's brutality and the pilgrims' wounds. Bonta leaves the reader to decide whether she is a comfort or an intrusion.
The final stanza changes in several ways at once. The verb is now present tense, "We yield the road," and the poem finally says "we." The speaker has stopped looking at monuments and joined a living landscape. What the walkers give way to is a short, quietly funny list: "sheep, a bicycle race, / old men bowling in the afternoon." The list runs from the ancient (sheep) to the modern (a bicycle race) to the idly timeless (old men at their game). Together they suggest that the pilgrim road is not a sacred corridor but a place where ordinary life carries on. The last word, "afternoon," is soft and unemphatic, and it lets the poem fade out instead of closing on a moral.
"Yield" is the key word, because it quietly answers the first stanza. The Moorkiller yields nothing; he conquers. The pilgrims of the second stanza yield their bodies, kneeling until they bleed. The modern walkers yield only the right of way, a humbler and gentler gesture. The poem seems to trace a movement from conquest through suffering to courtesy, though it never says so. The body links the three stanzas as well: a phallus, knees, and finally the ease of old men on a lawn or lane in the sun.
Formally, the poem is made of three unrhymed tercets in free verse. Their compression recalls haiku, though there is no syllable count, and the short lines force us to linger on each image. The syntax is also telling. Two of the three stanzas end on fragments, and the poem has no connecting argument, only juxtaposition. We are left to supply the meaning.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats a famous pilgrimage as something layered: violent myth, painful devotion, and ordinary afternoons all occupy the same road. The poet's choice of what to remember, the vulgar, the jolly and the incidental, suggests that the heart of a journey may lie in the things we did not set out to see.