Count Down by Robin Morgan

Count Down

by Robin Morgan

Survival is the final offer

that arrives at the eleventh hour

just when pain to the tenth power

would kill you with another ninth degree.

By then, relief strikes you brief as an eighth note;

you wear doom proudly; it’s your seventh seal.

But life whispers through your sixth sense

of what might await you in some fifth dimension

where miracle is saved for the fourth quarter.

Tricked, you sigh and rise on the third day.

You know better, but with no second thought,

risk that first step—absurd as first love at first sight—

as if you were back at ground zero, as if it cost

nothing, as if this were not the last laugh.

It's a sonnet! An American sonnet! A poem that plays with language! A poem that depends on the reader understanding on cliches and idioms that use numbers!

I am a big fan of Robin Morgan's prose and her editing; Sisterhood Is Powerful, a collection of feminist essays that Morgan edited, is one of my favorite books and should (still) be required reading for everyone. She followed up that book with Sisterhood Is Global, which had essays by women all around the world. Also a book everyone should read.

But this poem is one of my favorites. I cannot recall when I first read it or where it was--a book, lit mag, mimeographed . . . ? No clue. It was a poem that after reading it a few times in a row, I thought two things:

Dag, I wish I had written that!

The Robin Morgan who is a feminist writer wrote this? Wow!

So much for feminists having no sense of humor, not that you had to convince me (or feminists) of that. That was (and still is) a sexist trope.

Anyway, I love this poem. I hope you enjoy it, too! And check out other things by Morgan.