For me, this poem speaks truth, in a time when we are being ‘trained’ to distance ourselves from each other and, above all, to fear, particularly close contact with our fellow human beings.
It calls us to ‘wakefulness’ and feels particularly relevant to this time of St. John’s Tide.
A Sleep of Prisoners
A Poem by Christopher Fry
The human heart can go the lengths of God…
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake…
But will you wake, for pity’s sake?
Christopher Fry (1907 - 2005) was described, in his Guardian obituary, as a Christian humanist playwright.
It calls us to ‘wakefulness’ and feels particularly relevant to this time of St. John’s Tide.
A Sleep of Prisoners
A Poem by Christopher Fry
The human heart can go the lengths of God…
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake…
But will you wake, for pity’s sake?
Christopher Fry (1907 - 2005) was described, in his Guardian obituary, as a Christian humanist playwright.
