America vs Australia in Poems

America The Beautiful - Poem by Katharine Lee Bates

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Katharine Lee Bates

 

My Country - Poem by Dorothea Mackeller

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze ...

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

**

Dorothea Mackeller

Why Australia will never be America

 

The #guncontrol cabal run a fear campaign that any review of Aus Gun Laws will lead to US style gun culture.

But this is a terrible insult to Australia .

 

We will never be "merica"

Our National Myths & Psyche are poles apart.

- we sing of camping by a billabong & suicide not "conquer we must, when our cause it is just"

-We tell of the defeat at Eureka Stockade not Victory at Lexington & Concord

-our most famous explorers where the incompetent Burke & Wills not the success of Lewis & Clarke

- we commemorate & remebr the wasteful bloody sacrifice and defeat at Gallipoli in Anzac Day not Celebrate the Glorious victory through blood sacrifice on Independence Day.

- We came like a lap dog to two wars in Europe when our masters called. We did not tell tales of how we waded into an European war and rescued the world.

-We don't crow about victory in the Pacific, we talk of the close call at Kokoda despite being abandoned by Britain.

As Patton Says America Loves a winner.

Aussies Love our Sun burnt Country and the only martial sound we long for is the drumming of the steady soaking rain.

To see the difference for yourself I recommend starting by read compare and contrast "America.the Beautiful" by Katherine Lee Bate and "My Country" by Dorothea Mackeller