All the flowers

Today’s earworm/National Poetry Month entry comes to us from Don Cossacks, via Mikhail Sholokov’s 1934 novel And Quiet Flows the Don. Pete Seeger wrote the first three verses in 1955, and it was rounded out five years later by Joe Hickerson.

It was big in my youth, referencing the Vietnam War, and it’s sadly so applicable now in its original backyard.

I’m giving you Joan Baez singing "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" for Pete at the 1994 Kennedy Center Honors. She’s singing it in a much lower register than her early recordings. But it, sadly, is still universal.