“A Sleep of Prisoners”

The human heart may go the length of God.

 

Dark and cold we may be.

 

This is no winter now.

 

The frozen misery of centuries cracks,

breaks, 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 meet us everywhere,

never to leave us ’til we take

the greatest stride of soul folk ever took.

 

Affairs are now soul-size.

The enterprise is exploration into God.

 

But what are you waiting for?

 

It takes so many thousand years to wake.

 

But will you wake, for pity’s sake?

 

from Christopher Fry’s 1951 play, “A Sleep of Prisoners”

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