Lotte Heidenreich on the Pitt County funding fight, four hundred seniors fed and four hundred more waiting, and what poetry is actually for when the budget meeting gets ugly
I read a small local news story this week out of Pitt County, North Carolina, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since, in the specific, low-grade, background-hum way that certain stories lodge themselves and simply refuse to leave. A town council there voted to cut a nine thousand dollar supplement that had expanded Meals on Wheels coverage within their borders. Nine thousand dollars. I’ve spent more than that on considerably less important things over the years, and I imagine most of the people reading this have too, if we’re honest with ourselves about where our own money quietly goes.
What The Actual Numbers In This Story Did To Me
The county program serving that area feeds four hundred people. It has two hundred more on a waiting list. The average income of the people receiving these meals is nine thousand seven hundred dollars a year, against a federal poverty line of thirteen thousand. These are, in the exact words of the man who runs the program, some of the poorest of the poor in his entire community, and he stood in front of elected officials this month and simply said, plainly, without theatrics: every human should be fed. This is really about human beings. I have read a great many carefully crafted political statements in my life. I don’t think I’ve read one recently that cut through quite as cleanly as that one did.
Why I Sat Down And Wrote A Poem About It Instead Of Just Sharing The Article
Because sharing the article felt like the correct, responsible, adult thing to do, and also somehow insufficient, the way sharing things online so often is when what you actually feel is something closer to grief. I wanted to sit with the specific weight of that number, two hundred, two hundred actual people whose names exist on an actual list, whose hunger is not abstract or theoretical or a talking point in someone else’s budget spreadsheet. Poetry has always been, for me, the place I go when the ordinary tools of commentary feel too blunt for what I’m actually trying to hold.
The Poem Itself, For Whatever It’s Worth
Two Hundred Names
They keep a list, the way you’d keep
a garden, tending names instead of soil,
two hundred of them, patient, unfed,
waiting for a nine-thousand-dollar door
someone quietly closed in a room
with better lighting than their kitchens.
Nine thousand seven hundred dollars a year.
Not enough for the poverty line
to even notice them properly,
not enough for anyone’s headline,
just enough to know exactly
how many meals a small mercy could have bought.
I keep thinking of the man who stood
and said it plainly, no theatre in it,
every human should be fed,
this is really about human beings,
as if that needed saying, as if
we’d forgotten something so simple
we now require it spoken aloud
in a room full of people deciding
whether to remember it or not.
Why I Don’t Think This Poem Is Simply Protest, Though It’s Certainly That Too
I think it’s also, honestly, an attempt to keep myself from becoming numb to numbers like these, because I read funding stories like this constantly now, flat federal budgets for years running, waiting lists growing faster than the programs meant to shrink them, and there’s a real risk of simply developing calluses over the specific human weight of it. Writing forces me to slow down enough to actually feel the two hundred rather than just filing it away as one more statistic in an ever-growing pile of statistics I’ve stopped properly absorbing.
The Small, Genuinely Hopeful Counterpoint I Found This Same Week
Up in North Syracuse, a Meals on Wheels program just finished a million-dollar expansion, entirely funded through donations, more than three hundred volunteers showing up consistently enough that their director called them the heart and soul of the whole operation. It’s a genuinely lovely story, and I don’t want to undercut it, but I also can’t fully separate it from the Pitt County story in my head, because it makes plain exactly what’s actually filling the gap federal funding keeps leaving open: not policy, not sustained public investment, but the extraordinary, unpaid generosity of ordinary people who’ve simply decided their neighbours shouldn’t go hungry on their watch.
What I’m Actually Asking Of Anyone Reading This
Not much, honestly, beyond the same thing that man in Pitt County asked of his own town council. Remember that the number on the page has a name attached, that the meal has a specific person waiting for it, that nine thousand dollars is simultaneously nothing and everything depending entirely on which side of that waiting list you happen to be standing on. I wrote a poem this week because I didn’t know what else to do with how much that particular story wouldn’t leave me alone. I’m still not entirely sure it was enough. I’m fairly certain it was better than saying nothing at all.
One Last Thought Before I Close This Entry
I keep coming back to the phrase the man in Pitt County used, that this isn’t about who’s right, it’s about what’s right. I think that distinction matters more than almost anything else in how we talk about these budget fights, because it’s remarkably easy to get lost arguing about tax deficits and elected officials’ hard decisions and completely lose sight of the two hundred actual people standing quietly behind every one of those abstractions, waiting.