Wednesday, March 9, 2011

One of my favourite poems is said to have been written on an anonymous tombstone.

When picture look alive with movements free,
When ships like fishes swim beneath the sea,
When men, outstripping birds, can scour the sky,
Then half the world deep drenched in blood shall be.


Interestingly, when I googled it as someone had erroneously (I think) said it was Nostradamas, I found it tagged onto the bottom of a mother shipton prophecy.... now I have no idea where it is from. This is the prophecy one website claims;

http://www.merkurpublishing.com/prophecies_shipton.htm:
A house of glass shall come to pass
In merry England, but alas!
War will follow with the work
In the land of the bloody Turk,
And State and State in fierce strife,
Shall struggle for each other’s life.
Carriages without horses shall go
And accidents fill the world with woe.
And the center of a bishop’s see,
In London, Primrose Hill, shall be.
Around the world thought shall fly
In the twinkle of an eye.
Through the hills men shall ride
And neither horse nor ass bestride!
Under water men shall walk,
Iron in the water shall float
As easily as a wooden boat.
Gold shall be found and shown
In a land that’s now unknown.
Fire and water shall wonder do
And England shall admit a Jew.
Three times three shall lovely France
Be led to dance a bloody dance
Before the people shall be free;
Three tyrant rulers shall she see
Each spring from a different dynasty.
And when the last great fight is won
England and France shall be as one.
And now a word in uncouth rhyme
Of what shall be in later time.
In those wonderful far-off days
Women shall get a strange new craze
To dress like men and breeches wear
And cut off their beautiful locks of hair,
And ride astride with brazen brow,
As witches do on broomsticks now.
Then love shall die and marriage cease
And babies and sucklings so decrease
That wives shall fondle cats and dogs
And men live much the same as hogs.
In eighteen hundred and ninety-six
Build your house of rotten sticks
For then shall mighty wars be planned
And fire and sword sweep over the land,
And those who live the century through
In fear and trembling this will do.
Fly to the mountains and the glens,
To bogs and forests and wild dens,
For tempests will rage and oceans will roar,
And Gabriel stand on sea and shore
And as he toots his wondrous horn
Old worlds will die and new be born.
In the air men shall be seen,
In white, in black and also green,
Now strange, but yet they shall be true
The world upside down shall be,
And gold shall be found at the roots of a tree.
When picture look alive and movements free,
When ships like fishes swim below the sea,
When men, outstripping bird, can scour the sky,
Then half the world deep drenched in blood shall die.


However.... there is controversy of the Shipton prophecies and their truth, as one author of a book of her prophecies admitted to making up a doomsday claim often seen in this poem, the last two lines:
Published in 1448, republished in 1641. -I took this one from ye-olde-wikipedia :)

Carriages without horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world with woe.
Around the world thoughts shall fly
In the twinkling of an eye.
The world upside down shall be
And gold be found at the root of a tree.
Through hills man shall ride,
And no horse be at his side.
Under water men shall walk,
Shall ride, shall sleep, shall talk.
In the air men shall be seen,
In white, in black, in green;
Iron in the water shall float,
As easily as a wooden boat.
Gold shall be found and shown
In a land that's now not known.
Fire and water shall wonders do,
England shall at last admit a foe.
The world to an end shall come,
In eighteen hundred and eighty one."

So who to believe? Who knows... but they are awesome if they were prophecies... makes you wonder...
"Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the Earth is our mother. What befalls the Earth, befalls all the sons of the Earth?

This we know; the Earth does not belong to any man; man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. All things are connected.

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."

Not sure where this comes from, but i wrote it down in my yr 12 diary, after finding it in the front of a biology textbook. I like it. :)