**Verse 1** The old world ran on threat and fine, on fences, courts, and closing time, on "don't" scrawled over every door, while the ice went and the coastlines tore. We tried to legislate the sky and watched the numbers climb and climb — until a quiet generation asked not "how do we forbid," but "why." **Chorus** Two hundred years from the fever now, the rivers run and we don't know how we ever thought the whip and chain could grow a forest, stop a flame — we built it soft, we built it slow, we built it on what makes things grow, and the green came back, and the green came back, and the green came back to stay. **Verse 2** Now the rooftops breathe like living things, gardens climbing on copper strings, and every child who plants a seed gets counted, thanked, and let to lead — no carbon court, no smokestack fine, just cities wired to catch you kind, where the light comes on and the numbers turn the moment something starts to green. **Chorus** Two hundred years from the fever now, the rivers run and we don't know how we ever thought the whip and chain could grow a forest, stop a flame — we built it soft, we built it slow, we built it on what makes things grow, and the green came back, and the green came back, and the green came back to stay. **Verse 3** The engineers of the old regime believed the wolf must fear the gun, but the wardens of this new terrain just watch for what the wild has done — they seed the burned hills back to blue, they catch the salmon coming through, and every choice that helps the world gets echoed back in something true. **Chorus** Two hundred years from the fever now, the rivers run and we don't know how we ever thought the whip and chain could grow a forest, stop a flame — we built it soft, we built it slow, we built it on what makes things grow, and the green came back, and the green came back, and the green came back to stay. **Verse 4** No leader stands to point the way, no prophet burns to make us stay — just a billion small arrangements, tuned so kindness pays and the wreckage won't. The satellites don't watch for crime, they watch for coral, watch for time, and when a reef comes back to life the whole horizon rings like chimes. **Chorus** Two hundred years from the fever now, the rivers run and we don't know how we ever thought the whip and chain could grow a forest, stop a flame — we built it soft, we built it slow, we built it on what makes things grow, and the green came back, and the green came back, and the green came back to stay. **Verse 5** So if you're standing in the fever now, in the fenced and frightened world, know there's a shape still waiting for you, a design not yet unfurled — not utopia dropped from the stars above, just contingencies built from love, and somewhere two hundred years from here they're singing what we're dreaming of. **Chorus** Two hundred years from the fever now, the rivers run and we don't know how we ever thought the whip and chain could grow a forest, stop a flame — we built it soft, we built it slow, we built it on what makes things grow, and the green came back, and the green came back, and the green came back to stay.
