The Aughts: A History
’00
My father thinks it would be neat if he lives into the next century. He does.
Everyone holds their breath as the clocks turn midnight. No airplanes fall out of the sky. Computers keep humming.
I take a poetry workshop. I hear the words Po-Biz for the first time.
’02
I get a hysterectomy. I am too old to have babies, but I write six poems about how
much I still want to have babies.
Our government decides to invade Iraq. They say it will make us safe. Even my
father knows this is calamitous.
I write two poems of despair. Also, a long letter to my senator. I actually believe
she’ll read it, even though she lived clueless eight years in the White House.
’03
Our president does not say Mission Accomplished. But he stands on an aircraft
under a Mission Accomplished banner. Off the coast of California.
Global deaths from the deadly SARS-CoV-1 coronavirus exceed eight hundred,
making travel restrictions necessary to contain it. I barely hear about it.
We don’t move to Florida, as my father hopes. We move ten miles down the road. I
write a poem about how I don’t want to sell my old house.
’04
The realtor hates me. He will only talk to my husband. It’s been months, he says
and averts his eyes.
The defense secretary explains that we go to war with the army we have, not the
one we’d like. My father achieves another life goal; to cruise through the Panama Canal. He is too sick to go up on deck.
’05
What is this bird flu thing? I’m glad we live in a country that’s safe.
I write a poem that is too personal to publish. I publish it anyway.
I hope my father doesn’t see it.
’06
We meet a famous senator on a Nantucket ferry. I want to congratulate him for his
vote against the Iraq invasion. He’d rather pose with our family for photos. And say
what a fine day it is.
Our family has a funeral. Unwilling to travel, my father sends flowers.
I make photo collages of our meeting with the senator. It doesn’t work as a poem.
’07
We all travel south for a big family reunion. It lasts less than an hour, and there is
not much food.
Our president is not worried about the Iraqi morass, because he’s not the type of
guy who sits around and thinks about his legacy, he says.
I turn 60. I ask my father to tell me again the story of the huge snowstorm he had to
drive though to get from his WWII naval base to the hospital to see me for the first time.
’08
My senator regrets her Iraq vote. It messes with her idea of living in the White
House again.
I think I kill a squirrel. It darts under my tires. I exaggerate the telling of it for my
father. He laughs. I can’t sleep for weeks.
Some banks collapse. Everyone whispers, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
I publish a dark cinquain. Complicated. Something about a canary in a mine.
‘09
That hopey thing is in the White House. I can’t watch the way it starts to drag its
wings.
I write a series of poems about spiritual hunger.
My father will live another five years.
Maryanne Hannan has published poems widely, in Rattle, Gargoyle, Cider Press Review and elsewhere. This is her third publication in Slant. A retired Latin teacher, she lives in upstate New York. She is fascinated with the idea that we live as individuals in a collective time. The Aughts, a decade nearly a pun itself, what ought we to have done, to have averted the various challenges we’re now facing is especially pivotal. But time is open-ended and unpredictable. Some things begin; others end; and not necessarily in the order we expect. For instance, her father feared not being alive at the beginning of the decade and was still alive at the end. That was the point of entry into the examination of the decade, the strange intermingling of fact and memory, the personal and political through historical time.
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