When The Millennium Comes

EN the Millennium

Only the kings will fight,

While the princes beat the drums,

And the queens in aprons white,

Arnica bottle in hand,

Watch their Majesties throw,

With a gesture vague and grand,

Their crowns at the dodging foe,

Poor old obsolete

That Time hangs up in a row.

When the Millennium

And the proud steel navies meet,

While the furious boiler hums,

And the vengeful pistons beat,

The sailors will stay on

And cheer with a polyglot

The self-fed cannon that

Till metal has fought it out,

But the warm, glad bodies of

Are not for the waves to flout.

When the Millennium comes,

Love, the mother of life,

Will have worked out all the

Of our dim industrial strife,

And every man shall be

Of his deed and his dream, and the

Of war shall be

As a dragon-tale of yore,

Myth of the Iron Age,

A monster earth breeds no more.