Posted on 09/04/2018 6:57:40 AM PDT by grame
First of all thank you to all our FR veterans for your sacrifice and service to our nation. My twin grandsons have enlisted, one just finished basic and is at Sheppard AFB for training. The other will graduate next week from basic and head to Goodfellow AFB for training. They have 3 grandpas who are Air Force veterans.
Im searching for a poem or essay that I had when my son was stationed in Kosovo. Not sure where I heard it or read it but it rang so true to this mother of a soldier deployed.
It started out I thought I was patriotic when I stood for the National Anthem but then....
Thanks for any assistance you can offer.
Thank you. Awesome pic!
I have to avoid the tv to avoid the splody head!
Here are some places to start looking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eBxVxO0nh4
https://www.poetrysoup.com/poems/best/national_anthem
https://www.poemsource.com/patriotic-poems.html
http://www.home.riverview.net/vfw_post2053/poems.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msYPbjFC50w
Veterans Hallelujah
AND THIS:
“If” by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, dont deal in lies,
Or being hated, dont give way to hating,
And yet dont look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dreamand not make dreams your master;
If you can thinkand not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth youve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: Hold on!
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kingsnor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything thats in it,
Andwhich is moreyoull be a Man, my son!
OH. I am sorry. I didn’t read your full post before I went into action. Need a bit more coffee, I guess. I shared some inspiring thoughts, but not what you specified. Sorry.
“Breathes there a man with soul so dead ...”
Lay of the Last Minstrel — Sir Walter Scott
My favorite : A Psalm of Life, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
High Flight
John Gillespie Magee, Jr
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, —and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of —Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jr.
Here’s a place
http://www.usflag.org/essays.html
I can always use a bit of inspiration!
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