My new song. Please support Ukraine in their fight for democracy.
New colors wave for freedom
Wheat beneath the blue
Thank you, Mr. Molotov
We raise this glass to you
Old men with the young men
Staring down the tanks
They’ve shuttered up the opera
And sandbagged all the banks
Someone said that liberty’s
Been buried with a spade
Underneath the bodies
Of the men in the brigade
Who fought in Spain
We all live in Ukraine
Hypocrisy and tyranny
Beneath a golden dome
Wake up and you’ll find them
In the backyard of your home
The oligarch, the autocrat
Why can’t you understand?
He hides behind a painted face
And smells of contraband
His fighter jets crisscross your sky
His men march through your mud
The mothers’ and the babies’ and
The old man’s blackened blood
Flows down your drain
We all live in Ukraine
Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mao,
Pinochet and Pol Pot
Despotism through the years
As common as the rot
He beats his breast and then declares,
“Democracy’s for fools
He who wields the iron fist
Is he who makes the rules”
No place we can run to,
Ain’t no place we can hide
We need guns and bandages
We don’t need no ride
Let me explain
We all live in Ukraine
The iceman in the Kremlin
Wants us to call him boss
But someone in the kitchen’s
Putting vodka in his sauce
And if you speak against him,
I wouldn’t taste the tea
He’ll burn all your possessions
And he’ll hang you from a tree
His finger’s on the trigger
He hasn’t got a friend
Bare-chested in a snowstorm
And everywhere he’s been
He leaves a stain
We all live in Ukraine
The overlord is poison
Smeared upon the gates
It tars the hands of children
And the food upon their plates
The railways and the harbors
The concrete and the stones
The hospitals and highways
TVs and telephones
The markets and the steel mills
The coffee shops and bars
The hotels and the churches
The bicycles and cars
All make it plain
We all live in Ukraine
But you don’t have to listen
I just sing the blues
The Russian is a friend of ours
I heard it on Fox News
They say those bombs are gentle
They’re liberating Kyiv
From Jewish neo-Nazis
They want you to believe
That cat who thinks he’s funny,
He won’t have half a chance
No one’s stopped an army yet
With just a song and dance
He’ll die in vain
We all live in Ukraine
Three men on the freeway
Defending soil and salt
Meet an armored column
And bring it to a halt
Join us with a pitchfork
A hammer or an axe
To greet Vlad the Impaler
And kill him in his tracks
You think that freedom matters
In these cities of the plain?
They’ll stomp upon the flowers
That you planted in the rain
So don’t complain
We all live in Ukraine
(2/28-4/5/22)
Copyright © 2022 by Michael Kim Roos
