Timothy Pilgrim
High on Adventure's Poet Laureate
Timothy Pilgrim

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023,
OUR 27TH YEAR
 
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ADVENTURE POETRY
By Timothy Pilgrim
  
   
 

Vast silence

(with a nod to Ted Chiang)

A people conquered, stripped
of land, children, homes. Captives
for life. Language forbidden —

pleas for food, blanket, drink
permitted only by sign, wave,
blink. With the last elder’s death,

vanished, stories, songs, poems.
Gone, every dance, painting, play.
At the end, only vast silence.

On cell wall, a farewell, scratched
in English, the lettering, crude —
you be good we forgive you

(published by Clover, A Literary Rag)

 

 

 

 

 

Sprague, WA sunrise
Sprague area Wash sunrise
copyrighted Pilgrim photo

  
  Timothy Pilgrim, a native of Montana and retired university journalism professor living in Bellingham, WA, is a Pacific Northwest poet and 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee. His poems have been accepted more than 500 times by journals such as Toasted Cheese, Mad Swirl, Cirque, Santa Ana River Review, Windsor Review, Hobart, Otoliths and Prole Press in the U.S. Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. He is the author of Mapping water and Seduced by metaphor: Timothy Pilgrim collected published poems, which the back cover calls “a 10 on any Richter imagination scale.”