Christopher Fry’s poem from the play A Sleep of Prisoners is one of those pieces which really sets my timbers a shivering. It’s so expressive of the situation we find ourselves in collectively. It’s been quoted many times, so you may already be aware of it. For me it repays a regular re-read.
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 we 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 was an English poet and playwright 1907-2005
Featured image of Arctic ice floes from Collection of Dr. Pablo Clemente-Colon, Chief Scientist National Ice Center, via Wikimedia Commons
I can't believe it! 
thank you for this; being a read-out-loud person, it’s particularly stunning that way.
and it reminds me of another older poet, William Butler Yeats: written just after WWI, it still resonates at a different, almost prophetic level a hundred years later.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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Thank you for another superb piece of a similar timbre.
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