A bell is made to be heard. Hung in a tower, it speaks for a whole town, calling people together, marking the hours, announcing deaths. So when Dave Bonta opens "Destinies" with the past "like a great bell / coming up empty," the image lands with a small shock. "Coming up" suggests something hauled from below, like a bucket from a well, and what should be full of sound and meaning is hollow. Whatever the past was supposed to hand down, it brings up nothing.
The three couplets that follow read like consequences, though the poem never says so. Each offers a fate introduced by a bare connective: "who uses / a box as a home," "who is kept / in an open prison," "or met at the end / of a cheap bed." There are no capitals, full stops or question marks. The word "who" can be read as a question or as the leftover half of a sentence that began "those who…", and the poem never supplies the missing start. The people stay anonymous, defined only by where they end up. That suits the plural title. These are not one grand fate but a handful of possible outcomes, and the "or" in the last couplet makes them sound like items on a menu nobody chose from.
The poem's central idea seems to be that when the past offers no inheritance, destiny shrinks to something small and enclosing. Look at the objects in turn: a bell, a box, a prison, a bed. Each is a container. The poem moves from a vessel that should be full of sound to a vessel that holds a person, and the scale falls with it. "Great" gives way to "cheap," and the language narrows from something that echoes across a town to something you could fit a body into.
The line breaks do quiet work. "Who uses" hangs alone for a moment before "a box as a home" completes it, and in that pause "uses" can sound like people being used. In the same way, "kept" stands at the end of its line before the prison arrives, and it carries other associations: being retained, being preserved, being held like a possession. "Open prison" is the most unsettling phrase. It is a real kind of low-security prison, but here it reads as a paradox, a confinement with no visible walls. Judging by the imagery, the poem may be pointing at the way poverty or circumstance can trap someone as firmly as a lock.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its rhythm comes from short, hesitant first lines in the middle couplets ("who uses," "who is kept") followed by longer lines that unspool a little further. The sound patterning is subtle but real. A short, clipped "e" runs through "bell," "empty," "kept," "met," "end" and "bed," like a handful of dull knocks. The last of these is the most telling. "Bell" and "bed" differ by a single consonant, and the swap matters. The ringing "l," which lets a bell's note linger, is replaced by the stopped "d." The poem begins with a bell that fails to resonate and ends on a word that simply thuds.
"End" is also ambiguous. It could be the foot of the bed, or the end of a life, and "met" leaves open who or what is doing the meeting. It might be death, or a stranger, or just the next bad night. The poem doesn't say, and that restraint is a strength. Bonta gives no explanation, no named victim and no moral. He gives four small images and trusts the reader to feel what links them.
That compression is what makes the poem worth reading. In about thirty words it covers homelessness, confinement and mortality (or at least it invites those readings), without once raising its voice. It also plays quietly on the word "destiny," which usually suggests something grand and meaningful. Here the word is stripped of its glamour, and the reader is left with a hollow bell and a cheap bed, and the silence in between.