When The Millennium Comes

WHEN the Millennium comes

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 crowns

That Time hangs up in a row.

When the Millennium comes

And the proud steel navies meet,

While the furious boiler hums,

And the vengeful pistons beat,

The sailors will stay on shore

And cheer with a polyglot shout

The self-fed cannon that roar

Till metal has fought it out,

But the warm, glad bodies of boys

Are not for the waves to flout.

When the Millennium comes,

Love, the mother of life,

Will have worked out all the sums

Of our dim industrial strife,

And every man shall be lord

Of his deed and his dream, and the lore

Of war shall be abhorred

As a dragon-tale of yore,

Myth of the Iron Age,

A monster earth breeds no more.