Flowers from Garden on Kitchen
Table Tonight

A friend who lives in a Catholic retirement home invited us over to dinner and concert at the home today. The concert was put by on elderly residents of the home and featured a number of folk songs. One song “Where have all the Flowers gone, lyrics below, a song that I heard many times before, struck me as fresh and new.

Pete Seeger who wrote the first three verses of the song was someone I actually had met. The first time was in 1968 when I went with Father James Groppi of Milwaukee on a bus to Resurrection City in D.C as part of the Poor Peoples campaign that Martin Luther King Jr. had called before he was assassinated. It was a casual meeting as he was sitting around one of the tents constructed just practicing his music. I did not realize that a year later Peter Seeger would be in Milwaukee performing a benefit concert for the Milwaukee 14 which I was part of.

What struck me about this folk song tonight was the circular nature of the song. The song, Seeger adopted from a Russian folk song, starts with the question Where have all the flowers gone and ends with the flowers growing. In between there is the tragedy of war and the suffering and death it brings.

Flowers come and go naturally but in this song it is man-made war that interrupts nature, but at the end is subject to nature.

Now that we live in a time of “endless wars” and man-made tragedies by ignoring our environment how will nature ever restore the flowers? I think of the flowers on my kitchen table. When they die I just go out in the rain garden and pick some more. But in late fall into the winter I will not be able to pick new flowers in the garden till the spring. If winter, like wars of today, never ended, there would be no more flowers for the vase. We must stop war and teaching of war, like at Marquette University; otherwise there will no more flowers.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone, long time passing?
Where have all the young girls gone, long time ago?
Where have all the young girls gone?
Gone for husbands everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the husbands gone, long time passing?
Where have all the husbands gone, long time ago?
Where have all the husbands gone?
Gone for soldiers everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards, everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers, everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

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