This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Arts & Entertainment

Redemption

Swampscott poet mourns those lost in 9/11 in award winning poem.

If you spend any time at all with poet Clem Shoenebeck it is clear that wherever he goes he leaves behind him a wake of kindness.

Share with him even a cup of morning coffee at Panera’s in Vinnin Square and it leads to hellos and introductions to most of the staff.

This compassion comes through in his poetry--each poem, no matter how difficult the topic, ends at a place of, if not peace, at least understanding.

Find out what's happening in Swampscottwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Take, for example, his poem For the Angels, Unwinged, first published in Aurorean in December, 2001, judged Outstanding Poem of Issue, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

The poem’s subject matter is instantly clear, instantly upsetting:

Find out what's happening in Swampscottwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

            On the flaming tower,

            you faced that terrible choice;

            the searing orange of the inferno,

            or the leap into the blue, where gravity

            harshly slammed you home.

Written in response to 9/11, Shoenebeck couldn’t stop thinking about those who jumped to their deaths. “Most of my poems come very laboriously, 20-25 rewrites,” he says, but not this one.

A dentist for his working life, Shoenebeck found poetry at the sight of his first grandchild in his daughter’s arms; “the words went through me [as if] the voice had been there forever.”

After that first poem, he continued to write, studying under local poet Jeanette Mays, and short story writer Dennis Must. He has found much publishing success, as well as two poems nominated for Pushcart Awards.

Poetry, he says, “opened me to what I was really feeling about things … introducing me to look inward.”

He is not afraid to confront the worst, as the second stanza of For the Angels, Unwinged demonstrates:

            In image only, a choice between heaven or hell

            when you threw yourselves into the sky,

            some holding hands, some in dizzy somersault,

            others reaching, arms outstretched,

            the wounded eagles searching for lift.

In the next section, Shoenebeck imagines the people falling as falling out of the known world, and falling back to the womb, back to the unknown from which we all come:

            The early flutter,

            drift and wavering

            of your abandoned selves,

            gave way to the straightening

            of your path

            acceleration

            gathering momentum

            plunging

            as if tethered

            by a bungee cord

            or was it an umbilical cord

            snapping at your back

            to earth’s womb

            and I could not look

            I turned away

            from your explosion

            of unbirth.

Notice how the words come faster and faster, as he describes how the bodies fall. As they race toward their death, by the end of this stanza, the poet, and with him the reader, has to look away.

Yet Shoenebeck redeems both the reader and those falling with his beautiful, inspired last section:

            Floating through that tainted heaven,

            with your life prolonged

            by those frozen gasps

            lasting beyond infinity,

            I prayed you were loved,

            I prayed you breathed pure air,

            I prayed you no longer knew

            that your wings had failed you.

 

            Now, you can fly …

He imagines the people who jumped as accompanied by the prayers and compassion of those who watched them fall. Thus, those falling and those who witnessed the horror come together.

In Schoenebeck’s work, sometimes all that’s left to us is to open our hearts and love the falling and the fallen. And, that love is not unimportant, not unvaluable.

“Poetry has been a gift to me,” Schoenebeck says.

And, in leading his readers to revisit that tragic event and then to move on in some kind of understanding, his words are his gift to us.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?