Cape Rep To Present Harwich Resident’s Epic Poem On 9/11

The journey in Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” centers on a pathway to salvation. Dante, physically, makes his way through hell to traverse purgatory so he can make it to heaven in order to reunite with his beloved Beatrice. Allegorically, Dante’s journey is one towards salvation, a recognition and a renunciation of sin in the hopes of achieving grace. 

A local writer borrows on Dante’s epic’s structure to convey his experience during an upcoming day of recognition.

On Sept. 11, the Cape Rep Theatre in Brewster will commemorate the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001 with a reading of “Bikeman.” The story, which will have a presentation in the Cape Rep Barn at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., is the account of Thomas Flynn, a former journalist and award-winning producer and writer for CBS News, of living in New York City and riding his bike towards the World Trade Center on the day the towers fell. “Bikeman” is an epic poem modeled after Dante’s “Inferno,” detailing Flynn’s travel into the heart of the chaos experienced that day. The day, according to Flynn, started like any other.

“I was at home, I lived in Greenwich Village, and I was outside. It was a beautiful morning,” began Flynn, noting he was having a coffee before going into work. “And then the plane went over my garden… it was not right, it was too low — it was not on the rivers, planes didn't go in the middle of the island.”

After hearing the crash, he told his wife Nancy, “we're under attack. I'm going down there” and raced off with pen and pad. He said he made it to the scene before the police locked it down, at the south tower roughly 45 minutes before it fell. He found a cameraman who was taking pictures and started doing basic reporting.

When the south tower fell he went from reporter to participant. He said he was with some EMTs from Brooklyn and they raced into a parking garage.

“Parts of this building were coming down on us. I mean, whole walls that were enormous,” he said. “Didn't look so big if you were looking at something 80 stories up, but when it hit, it hit loud and hard and lethal.

“It covered up the entrance, and we were trapped and it was dark and dense, gritty and hot. In there you couldn't see a thing.”

The poem is the story of his experience that day. Flynn said that writing the account was a process. He first pulled out his notes from the day nearly five years later. He had moved to Harwich and was in the process of rereading Dante’s “Inferno,” which he hadn’t read since high school, and his recollection of the story was vague. During the mornings throughout this time, he said he would read the story while riding his bike and “the two stories started working together.” 

He said he loved the first-person tense of the story, which is what he wanted people to get from the retelling of his story.

“I wanted people to have the experience of what it was like to go through that morning there,” he said.

The poem was first published in 2008, according to Flynn. When asked if he sees people failing to give the type of recognition or reverence towards honoring Sept. 11, something that was distinct in the years following, he agreed. He took the moment to share a portion of the poem as explanation.

“I feel a community with all of them and they with me,” he read. “Those I look at look back at me mute and solemn with an openness and a welcoming that I had not known before in this city, as if to say, we are one now. We must look out for each other, care for each other. We are one now, fellow citizens in the city crushed by anguish and agony. We are one now, canon the chaos as we silently scuffle on.”

The event is free to attend. For reservations and information, check out caperep.org.