The Hole

I was a big fan of the TV program, "The West Wing," for all of the years it was on the air. I watched it religiously, and was disappointed when it ended on May 14, 2006. It portrayed an America that was, at the same time, both realistic and idealistic, both disappointing and hopeful. And sometimes its messages approached profound. In one of the episodes, the President's chief-of-staff played by the late John Spenser, tells an aide a story to help him through a difficult crisis. I got to love that story, telling it again and again when I thought one of my troubled students needed to hear it. It never failed to touch each and every one of them with the message that they were not alone.

As I said, I have used that story for almost ten years now. But each time I tell it, I never fail to feel some of the pain of the person I am trying to console. I wrote this poem to illustrate what the victim in the story must have felt before redemption. I wanted to try to use words to describe a feeling, a very deep and cold one. Like the hole they had fallen into.

The Hole
Christopher Bogart

A stale and fetid smell hangs
In a hell of dank darkness.

Enclosed within earthen walls
Worn smooth by past and frantic falls,
Fingers claw at empty air,
The desperate memories of past plunges
To the stone-strewn floor.

White glow,
The oval opening illuminates,
To far to find,
To climb past failed attempts,
To far away to penetrate,
Too slow
To show,
To echo through its cavernous emptiness,
Far too far below.

Worms bore through confidence.
Slender rills,
The roots of woe,
Wander from parent bark,
To snake the dingy dark,
Stark unaware,
Abandoned to all care, they
Leech down through the long-forgotten void.

And around the barren cone,
Swirl the bitter banshees
Of past abandonments.
Their eyes tight shut,
Their mouths agape,
They howl soundlessly
Into the stillness
Held within the hollow
Of the hole.
Hollow,
Save me.