Most stories about pilgrimage promise a destination. Dave Bonta's "Pilgrims' progress" gives its travellers a labyrinth instead, and then takes almost everything out of it. The title recalls Bunyan's allegory *The Pilgrim's Progress*, where a road leads step by step toward salvation. Bonta changes the singular pilgrim to a plural, and "progress" loses its capital letter. We are no longer following one chosen soul along a marked path. We are a crowd, and the path has become a puzzle.
The poem opens mid-journey: "past all fear / we come to a labyrinth." A labyrinth is normally a frightening place, a structure built to confuse, but here the fear is already behind us. The phrase "past all fear" can mean beyond fear or simply having walked by it, and the poem lets both readings stand. "Come to" is also quiet and passive. Nobody storms the labyrinth or searches for it. It is simply where the road ends up.
The second stanza strips the place bare: "nothing in it / but accidents like dust / falling down over all." We expect a labyrinth to hold a monster, a treasure, or at least a meaning. Bonta offers only "accidents," and the simile "like dust" makes them slight, grey and impossible to resist. Dust settles slowly and evenly, without intention. The enjambment lets the sentence drift down the page the way dust would, and "over all" is wide enough to include the pilgrims themselves. The hard d sounds of "dust" and "down" give the stanza a dull, settling thud. Judging by the imagery, the poem is thinking about time, decay and chance, the sense that life is made of things that merely happen.
The final stanza is where the poem turns, and the turn depends on a small word. "Nothing in it / *but* accidents" is echoed by "without any other design / *but* love." The same "but" first lets in the accidents and then lets in love, and the echo ties the two ideas together. The first "but" announces a disappointment, and the second answers it. The land is "in pieces," a phrase that could describe the ground, the world or the people crossing it, and the grammar leaves the reference open. Then comes "design," which is a loaded word in a poem about a labyrinth, since a labyrinth is normally someone's design. Bonta suggests there is no hidden architect and no master plan, yet he does not conclude that nothing holds the scene together. What does is love, and it is offered as the only pattern, not a prize at the end.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letter anywhere, so the poem reads as one long sentence that never quite stops to explain itself. The vocabulary is plain and mostly one syllable, which makes the few longer words, "labyrinth," "accidents" and "design," stand out like landmarks. The stanzas run two lines, then three, then three, and the last line shrinks to the two-beat "but love." After the long falling movement of the middle stanza, the poem comes to rest on its shortest line, and that placement makes love the final, quiet weight. A rhyme would have sounded too much like a neat resolution. Instead the ending feels like an admission.
What makes the poem significant is its balance. It refuses the comfort of a plan, since the dust, the broken land and the absence of an architect are all left in view. It also refuses despair. The paradox of its last line is that love is called a "design" while being the one thing that is not a blueprint or a system. It is something the pilgrims carry in with them, not something they find at the centre. In eight short lines the poem suggests that when the journey has no guaranteed meaning, meaning can still be made by the people walking it together, and the word "we" is the first thing the poem gives us.