Counting Backwards

By Linda Pastan b. 1932 Linda Pastan

How did I get so old,

I wonder,

contemplating

my 67th birthday.

Dyslexia smiles:

I’m 76 in fact.

There are places

where at 60 they start

counting backwards;

in Japan

they start again

from one.

But the numbers

hardly matter.

It’s the physics

of acceleration I mind,

the way time speeds up

as if it hasn’t guessed

the destination—

where look!

I see my mother

and father bearing a cake,

waiting for me

at the starting line.

Poem copyright ©2010 by Linda Pastan, whose most recent book of poems is Traveling Light, W.W. Norton, 2011. Poem reprinted from Nimrod International Journal, Awards 32, Vol. 54, no. 1, 2010. Rights granted by Linda Pastan, in care of the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency.

Biography

Poet Linda Pastan was raised in New York City but has lived for most of her life in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. In her senior year at Radcliffe College, Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Immediately following graduation, however, she decided to give up writing poetry in order to concentrate on raising her family. After ten years at home, her husband urged her to . . .

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