Normally performed as a complex polyphonic arrangement, my arrangement as the Russian-language version of Koloda Duda is a dirge, intentionally deviating from the eastern Slavic folk music traditions, in line with my accented voice- as a statement of an outsider to the region. The song is sometimes described as a #Ukrainian song and sometimes as a song of the Don Cossacks. It comes from the lands now being torn apart by the #war.

The traditional ballad, which is where Pete Seeger got the concept for "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", explores a theme of ongoing loss- as each thing is named, it is in the next breath gone: the horse with the gate, the gate with the water, the swimming geese gone to the reeds, which were picked by the girls, who have gone with the husbands, who have been swallowed in that final, all consuming destination: war. There is none of the circulatory of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" in the original Cossack ballad- war does not go and disappear like the horse and the geese and the girls. It does not become flowers like the graveyards of the young men in #Seeger's work. It is the black pit into which life disappears.

This is a statement of mourning for the loss of lives, of friends and family, of homes. It is in mourning of the loss of freedom under repression, the loss of opportunities be with loved ones as borders grow tighter, the loss of being able to imagine a brighter future in a country that has hardened into tyranny. It is mourning of a machine that takes young men and turns them into accomplices in the atrocity that is war, that mutilates the soul, mind, and body alike. It is mourning of the victims of that war machine.

I was raised on the music of resistance to the Vietnam War- the music of my parent's generation. I knew Where Have All the Flowers gone from a very young age. As I grew up, I had to sing against the Afghan and Iraq invasions by America, both in protest of the invasion and the brutality against the invaded and occupied people, and in mourning for the young men being sent off to die in wars of conquest. As I met my partner and comrade, I began studying #Russian, first as a romantic gesture. I included in my arrangement, instruments given to me as wedding gifts or as gifts from my Russian in-laws, and returned to the source of the song I grew up with.

This version is in A Dorian or E minor, played on a G pennywhistle, a low D whistle counterpoint, a high D whistle on fills, a bodhran, a treschotka from Nizhny Novgorod, a Siberian jaw harp, and a shruti box set to A.

The lyrics, translated, are:

"Koloda-duda, where have you been?
I have been watching the horse- watching the horse.
and where is the horse?
By the gate.
Where is the gate?
The water has washed it away.
Where are the geese?
They have gone to the reeds.
- and where are the reeds?
The girls have gathered them.
Where are the girls?
They have gone, with their husbands.
and where are those cossacks?
They have all gone to war. "

Нет войне.

https://soundcloud.com/user-310458959/koloda-duda-koloda-duda