The Year 2000 Problem

                Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
                                —W.B. Yeats

Could it be that Yeats was right?
This digital shorthand that will shake
the whole world up as the millennium ends
in zeroes, goose eggs, naught-naught, not
the biblical 666 that will take us, but
the secular 00 after all, the beast
of our own shortsighted making?
And will bank accounts go bust,
and planes fall from the sky, and all
communications stop? The economy
revert to trade and barter? And what of
the Leonid meteor shower and the
massive solar flares, with their
particles and protons that will play
havoc with the music of the spheres
we've sent aloft to guide us through
these last years of the century? Of course,
we don't believe it, this bad disaster
movie we've seen time after time
in all our local theaters and rec rooms.
Alarmist nonsense, superstition.
We're beyond all that, we scoff.
Why dwell upon the past? Things
have never been better,
our hour come round at last.