2000 - 2020

I remember when we reached 2000.
Many believed that on that New Year’s Eve,
just as soon as  we’d given the old heave
-ho to 1999 (and the band

of the Scots Guard had played Auld Lang Syne on
Jools Holland’s Hootenanny) havoc would
be wreaked by the Millennium Bug. Could
the little bugger cause the destruction

of the World Wide Web? If banking systems
failed, all records lost, would that be goodbye
money? Would planes now fall out of the sky?
(At least it would rid us of online scams!).

We feared 2000 would tear us asunder.
It turned out to just be a number.

       *  *  *

‘When you get older
time speeds up,’ I hear
myself saying to younger

people. (I find there are
more younger people
than there used to be!).

We are on the beach,
heading towards the sea,
and I’m picturing me

twenty years ago. I was at a party.
We were staying with friends.
My daughter was five. I had no vision,

no thought, of 2020. But it’s arrived.
It’s snuck in. Twenty Twenty! 
It rolls off the tongue. 

Rolls too easily off the tongue.
Rolls off the tongue effortlessly.
I really want it to slow down

but it rolls off the tongue with abandon.
Recklessly it rolls off the tongue, 2020,
and enters the poor damaged sea.