The Patriotic Power of Poetry

Two asides before we get to poetry:

Michael Johns gone!!!No, No, No, No. Should have been at least three others before him, and I think he probably should have won it all. Boo, Boo, Boo!!!!!

As a colon cancer survivor, I am celebrating a perfect colonoscopy this week--so relieved # 1 to have it over for another 5 years, and # 2 for there to be NO polyps. Also celebrating a perfect mammogram (this may be too much information)--I have been know to have cysts, aspirations, needle biopsies, etc. THANK YOU, GOD.

Poetry has long stimulated patriotic feelings--ever since the songs of Moses and Miriam in Exodus 14.

One can just think of the first line of a poem and visualize a moment in history or a certain flag (since the U. S. A. is where I live, those will have to be my references): Do you know them all?

"O, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain....."

"Give me your tired, your poor...."

"O, say can you see by the dawn's early light...."

"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed...."

Here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shots heard round the world...."

"In Flanders Fields where poppies blow between the crosses row on row...."

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord...."

Everybody ready to stand and pledge?