Shakespeare Behind Bars Poem by Wojja Fink

Double murderers,
every crime imaginable
men eaten with remorse
prisoners of their own misdeeds
without hope of redemption
or forgiveness,
locked in a circle
of punishment without pardon,
until Shakespeare entered like thin air through the ether
of the State Correction Home,
and got the inmates to change their
clothes, little did they suspect,
the storm about to break,
as Prospero and cast
came to life inside the prison walls;
and forgotten men grown old within
their prime, were touched,
by words that stretched
through four hundred years......
of time and space,
and woke them from despair
of not knowing,
not knowing if forgiveness
had forsaken them…..
not knowing where it would dawn.

For no officials of redemption,
or correction,
Knew just what to say
to men in another world
but not completely lost
in the darkness,
of the prisoners hell.

The Tempest raged within their breast
flooding tears,
howls of remorse
released them from the
grips of reproach,
and men grown old
in prisons loveless dungeons
wept on stage,
as though they had never known
how to weep
for a thousand years,
and found they had but themselves
to forgive
for being in the sway
of something other than
The one Self in all.

How else would William know?
how to speak to them in their cells
and tell them where,
forgiveness lies?


And thus speak them free men.
Never to return;
To the darkness.

(idea from the film Shakespeare Behind Bars)
.