A pilgrimage normally points toward a holy place, but the walker in Dave Bonta's poem is going nowhere in particular: "i descend the mountain / just so i can climb it / yet again." The journey is a loop, and the walking is the point. Along the way the poem gathers up a morning in what seems, judging by the acorns, the fog and the migrating hawks, to be early autumn. It ends with a joke that has a serious edge, about faith, farming and what actually feeds the ground.
The poem begins with smell: "a morning-fresh aroma / from the compost / steaming in the cool air." Putting "fresh" next to "compost" sets the poem's attitude at once. Rot isn't disgusting here, it's alive. The other senses arrive one at a time. Touch comes with fog "as soft as the moss," and sound with "acorns clattering down." The fog simile is a pleasing crossing of the senses, since moss is something you feel, so the fog becomes something you could stroke. The hard, percussive "clattering" then knocks against that softness.
The form is nine unrhymed tercets in short lowercase lines, with almost no punctuation and no full stop at the end. There is no regular meter. The rhythm comes from the line breaks and from sentences that spill across stanza gaps. "The first broad-winged / hawks of the day" is complete only when the next stanza supplies "spiral high around." The reader tips from one stanza into the next, a little like the momentum of a downhill walk. Because nothing is formally closed off, the poem can be started again, just as the speaker's climb can. The small "i" suggests a modest, unshowy narrator, one walker among hawks and tractors.
The poem also moves vertically and horizontally. It starts at ground level, drops down the mountain, then lifts with the hawks, who "spiral high around / a column of rising heat / then hurtle south." The verbs match their motion. "Spiral" curls, and "hurtle" lands with weight. Then the poem flattens out into the farm show's "long rumbling / line of tractors" that "snakes through the fields." The l and r sounds in "long rumbling line" make the engine noise, and the line itself is a kind of procession. Three journeys run side by side: the speaker's looping walk, the hawks' one-way migration, and the tractors' slow parade.
That image of a procession prepares for the turn: "they used to say / rogation was good / for the crops." Rogation is the old Christian custom of walking the fields in prayer to ask a blessing on the harvest. The past tense in "used to say" sounds faintly doubtful, as if the speaker, who is also walking a ritual route, isn't sure what the walking achieves.
The last stanza answers with its most surprising line: "even bullshit walks / on six legs / bit by bit into the earth." The phrase works two ways. It means literal manure, and it also means the empty talk that surrounds any tradition, possibly including the promises about rogation. Six legs point to insects, perhaps dung beetles, though the poem doesn't say. They take the mess down into the soil in tiny increments, and "bit by bit" gives the line a slow, grinding pace. The word "walks" makes the beetles into pilgrims too, and the poem's real blessing turns out to be their unglamorous work. "Even" suggests that nothing is wasted, not even the worst of it. The ending also loops back to the compost of the first stanza, so the poem's structure matches the walk it describes.
What makes the poem worth reading is its tone. It takes a religious tradition and a working farm landscape and finds the sacred in them without piety or sentimentality. The humor keeps it honest, and the plain, observed details, such as steam, fog and acorns, do the arguing without any lecture. In nine short stanzas it suggests that the true ritual may be paying attention, and that decay is how the world renews itself.