Poems Can Be An Emotional Release

As stated in my last blog, I wrote a lot of poems between the age of nine and to around my mid-twenties. I find it interesting that nearly every new writer I have spoken with has told me they started out writing poems. I think that’s pretty common. You get the writing bug, but you don’t think you can write a whole book, so you go to the next best thing – writing poems. 


Most writers are very romantic, emotional and dramatic on the inside – “drama queens” in a sense, even though that doesn’t always show on the outside. How often do you cry over a romantic movie or book in which something melodramatic happens? Unrequited love, the hero or heroine dies, or they struggle to stay together against terrible odds? How often do you go to bed wishing a movie or book had ended differently? Or go to bed dreaming of your own plot for your own story, even if you aren’t a writer?

That drama in a budding writer often comes out in poetry. What I find so surprising today is that many of the poems I wrote when very young show a lot of emotion and romance, even when I wasn’t old enough to understand all of that. And although most are probably at least fifty years old (I’m 72), a lot of them remain relevant to today’s times and would fit right in with our modern world, especially ones I wrote about war.

Here is my next edition of poetry, as promised. This one is not romantic, but it is certainly full of emotion and drama. I chose this one because of the state of disarray and distrust and division our country is in today. It is time to come together and remember who we are – the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA – and how we reached such prominence in the world. It is time to relax and give our new president a chance. He is, after all, just a man with a big family of his own. Like any man he wants what’s best for his children and grandchildren, so he is not going to do something horrible and crazy like some think.

In the meantime, too many of us have forgotten how blessed we are to live here, and the sacrifices made by our forefathers that brought us freedoms enjoyed by no other country in the world. It astounds me to see protestors shouting “down with America” and talk about what a terrible place this is, when few other countries would even give them the right to speak out against the government. They are standing and protesting in the very country that affords them those very rights as well as offering them the best life a man could want. Where do they think they could go to have life any better?

I wrote this poem in 1967. I wasn’t the child I was when I wrote my first poem in the second grad. I was twenty-two years old and the war in Vietnam was happening … and my own husband was involved. That is very likely why I wrote this. In the era of Vietnam this nation was again in a state of disarray and distrust and division. The treatment we gave our returning soldiers from Vietnam was deplorable. May God forgive us. Yes, our government made a poor choice regarding that war, but those soldiers only did what they were asked to do, and those of us who weren’t there have no right judging any of it. The soldiers didn’t create that war. The government did. And soldiers are bound by law and the Constitution to do what the government asks them to do.

This poem is a tiny bit hokey in a few places (remember – drama queen who was afraid for her husband), but I meant every word of it then and I mean every word of it now.


A PRAYER FOR OUR NATION

1967 – Rosanne Bittner

God, save our country! We love it so.
Lend us Thy hand. In Thee let us grow.
Will man never learn that when empty of Thee,
A nation must perish? Oh, why can’t they see?

It was Thee who did make us, and through Thee we grew
To be what we are. Thou art the clue.
Lord, let us not lose Thee! We need Thee as our Guide.
Else we would lose face, for Thou art our pride!


God, please take this nation. Hold it in Thy hand.
And make us remember our love for this land.
God, don’t let us lose the things we stand for.
Those things are what make us. They open the door.

The door to all freedom, let it not close!
Let us keep it open and fight freedom’s foes!
God help us stamp out the evil and wrong.
Let us gladly sing our nation’s sweet song.

Remind all the young of the treasure they hold –
Of long-vanished people who formed wealth untold.
Fill the hearts of this nation with love and with pride
In their homeland of beauty. Let us abide …

In Thy trustworthy care … And, Lord, let us fall
On our knees for forgiveness for the sin of us all.
The sin of forgetting that only through Thee
Did we mold such a nation, so rich and so free!

For, Lord, without Thee we surely will die,
And fall in the footsteps of nations gone by.
Those nations who left Thee behind on life’s way,
And without Thy counsel fell into decay.

God, help our country! Keep it alive!
And on They good words let our people thrive!
God, fill our country! Seep into its core.
Lend us Thy courage through strife and through war.

Our forefathers made us. May we ne’er forget
How they fought and they died - how they shed blood and sweat …
To give us the freedom we so lightly take.
Oh, Lord to forget this is such a mistake!

We thank Thee, dear Father for this nation of ours,
For food, health and shelter, and a lead in world power.
We look up to Thee, our help and our friend.

May we remain great, until the world’s end!

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