Children of Kyiv

Say NO to war in Ukraine.

I wrote this piece originally as a bagpipe tune. Why? Because I was appalled, and somehow putting tiny dots on a music staff made me feel a little better. A poor way of expressing myself, I know. But there it is.

When I started recording it, one thing led to another. Before I knew where I was, the bagpipes had been supplanted by the kaleidoscope tones of a madhouse unfolding before us. The music started taking on a Slavic feel. The more I thought about the atrocities of this war, the more I heard the voices of the children asking their parents the impossible question. Why?

Children of Kyiv – why Kyiv? I use the term Kyiv figuratively to represent an idea. It could have been Mariupol, Bucha, Kharkiv or the many other cities that this monster, Putin, has decimated. But Kyiv is the capital and represents the whole of Ukraine.

For a westerner, the images we see in the news are beyond distressing. The streets, buildings, and cars are not from some obscure nation in a part of the world we know nothing about. These scenes, so familiar, could be played out in my city, on my streets. Which, I think, is exactly what Volodymyr Zelenskyy is trying to get the world to understand.

My wildest hope is that this war will be the war to end all wars; that this war will unify the world in such a way that has never been seen before – no not even during COVID; that the governments of every country in the world will join hands and say to those nations that would wage war. NO! No more. We will not allow it – it STOPS right here!