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
That fought in Spain.
We all live in Ukraine.
Hypocrisy and tyranny
Beneath a golden dome–
Wake up and you’ll find ’em
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 criss-cross your sky,
His men march through your mud.
The mothers’ and the babies’
And the old men’s blackened blood
Flows down your drain.
We all live in Ukraine.
Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mao,
Pinochet, 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.”
Ain’t 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 ice man 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 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 a freeway,
Defending soil and salt,
Meet an armored column
And bring it to a halt.
So join us with a pitchfork,
A hammer or an ax.
We’ll greet Vlad the Impaler
And kill him in his tracks.
You think that nothing matters
In these Cities of the Plains?
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
