Where have all the flowers gone?
Young men picked them, every one.
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone to graveyards, every one.
With the Russian army killing and maiming untold thousands as I write this article, Pete Seeger's 1955 antiwar song is sadly too relevant once again. As some of us protested the Vietnam War back in the 1960s and 1970s, Seeger's song was one of a half dozen songs that helped the movement build popular support for an end to the war. Others included Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" and Tom Paxton's "Lyndon Johnson told the Nation."
You can read the full lyrics of Seeger's song here.
You can listen to a number of groups sing the song on YouTube. One of my favorite versions is performed by Joan Baez.
I did not realize until this month as I read about the song's origin, that Seeger's song was inspired by lines taken from the traditional Cossack folk song "Koloda-Duda" referenced in the Mikhail Sholokhov novel And Quiet Flows the Don (1934).
"Where are the flowers,
the girls have plucked them.
Where are the girls,
they've all taken husbands.
Where are the men,
they're all in the army."
So now we have Russians invading a sovereign and independent neighboring Ukraine in an effort to restore some of the former territory that once made up the Soviet Union. Putin cloaks this territorial gluttony in false pieties, claiming that he is saving Russians in the Ukraine from Nazis, attempting to reunite them with their motherland.
The truth is that Putin is an evil, power hungry tyrant fated to join Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin as one of the worst humans to visit the planet earth.
Poems and songs to oppose war
April is National Poetry Month in the USA, an event celebrated by the New York Times in an excellent article, "What is poetry?"
Over the decades and centuries, many songwriters and poets have lent their voices to oppose senseless wars like the one being fought against the innocent people of the Ukraine.
During this time period I have written four poems expressing my sadness and outrage and included a fifth poem below written in 2017 while I was living in Russia.
The four demons of the Apocalypse
Some regimes
Just like diapers
Trash
Or dirty laundry
Need changing
From time to time
Smelling bad
And reeking of corruption
They must move on
Disappear
And cease to be
And so this Vladmir Putin
An ugly small man
This menace
Scourge
And enemy of all that is decent
Must go
Retire
And give it all up
Must walk away in shame
After starting a senseless war
Invading a peaceful neighbor
Killing innocents
Mothers
Babies
And grandmas
Shelling hospitals
Schools
And apartment buildings
Sending young men and women
To do his dirty work
Carry out his war crimes
All to restore a failed empire
To some mistaken sense of former glory
Delusional
Obsessed
And incompetent
The man is criminally insane
His hands dripping with blood
His soul a rotten mass of writhing worms
And so
He will dance forever alongside Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini
As they suffer the worst tortures
Hades might offer
The four demons of the Apocalypse
The Damnation of Vladmir Putin
Each child
Each mother
Father
Son
Or daughter
Grandchild
Grandmother
Or grandson
That dies
Is wounded
Or maimed in this war of Putin’s
Will bring him ten years of torture
And a special place in Hell
A unique spot in Dante’s Inferno
Reserved just for him
To be boiled in a pool of blood
Undergoing an eternity of punishment
Befitting this horrid little man
Who would be Emperor
Or God
Who has no conscience
And no soul
Just an empty dark hole
Full of vile worms and excrement
For a heart
Putin the Hun
Cruel
And criminally insane
A pathological liar
And ruthless killer
Putin sends Russian boys
And Russian girls
To an early grave
Along with Ukrainian boys
And Ukrainian girls
Mothers
Fathers
And grandmothers
His dreams of empire
Blinding him to human pain
Human suffering
And human loss
He is a thug
A serial killer
And a monster
Like Hitler before him
Attila the Hun
And Benito Mussolini
He will bring us all to the brink
Of World War III
To the Abyss
And to the Apocalypse
Now
Bystanders
We are merely bystanders
Watching with horror
From a distance
This cruel and insane invasion
By Putin and his hordes
His raping, murderous criminal army
Rampaging, plundering and pillaging like barbarians of old
We need not suffer any wounds
Or watch our babies and grandparents die
Our husbands, sons and daughters perish
Instead we can sit comfortably watching from a distance
Mere bystanders
We watch this war unfolding
Like some Hollywood horror movie
Playing out on our widescreen TVs
We munch on Pringles
And open another beer
Af if this were a hockey or football game
And we the spectators
While Putin is licking his bloody fingers
And sadistic lips
Mumbling happy obscenities
As his legions stumble, stab, bomb and maim
The young, the old and the innocent
Even as we try to switch channels
Clicking on our remote controls in vain
The war goes on
And on
And if we should ask for whom the bell tolls
It tolls for thee
Credit to John Donne, whose poem “For whom the bell tolls”
inspired the ending of this poem
Back in 2017 while I was living in Sochi, Russia for six months I watched their Victory Day parade and came home that day to write the poem below - "Never Ending" - as all the photos of ancestors who fought off the Nazis made me think of the losses that always come with wars. There are always those like Putin who glorify the carnage with rhetoric meant to inspire patriotic and nationalistic fervor.
Never Ending
Each war begins
It seems
With celebration
Cheers
And fanfare
The promise of a quick victory
Death to the Hun!
The Nazi!
The zealot on the other side
An end to tyranny
An end to war altogether
The triumph of our side
Against their side
With God’s blessing
A chance for young men
And young women
To taste glory
Show courage
And win medals
But each war lies
Breaks promises
Maims
And lasts far too long
Each war takes the husbands
From wives
Wives from husbands
Mothers and fathers
From children
Each war takes away the young
Before their time
Kills dreams
Destroys hope
And plants new seeds
For wars to come
We cannot escape
It seems
As time and again
Destiny beckons
Parades begin
Flags fly proudly
And trumpets sound the call to arms
As sons and daughters heed the call
And once again
We go marching
Marching
Happily marching
Off to war
Oh, when will they ever learn?
This is a question best answered perhaps by a line from a Bob Dylan song . . .
The answer is blowing in the wind.
Yes, and how many deaths will it take 'til he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind
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