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Center City, Gaza Children proffer bowls Tables teeter on rubble Someone ladles love BIO: Nan Meneely has loved working with Haven's Harvest to rescue food. She has published two books with Antrim House. Letter from Italy, 1945 was named by the Hartford Courant as one of thirteen important books by 2013 Connecticut writers. Simple Absence, published in 2020, was nominated for the National Book Award.
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Picture from Somalia The eyes of a child who is starving to death have already died of expecting what never arrives. They hold a knowing language cannot shape. of what a wasting body tells. How shall I write of this beautiful boy when all I have is words? I look for something I could name as fear, fear of death, perhaps. But his has been a dying every day, as natural to him as breathing in and out. I can’t see hopelessness but maybe there was never hope to lose. If there is grief for what is not, it can’t be named, but maybe there has never been a plenty to regret. The rage that must be part of what consumes him hides. Perhaps it’s dammed behind the eyes gone dull with brute monotony of nothing to be done. I can’t see in. I cannot look away. I cannot look away although I’m sometimes hungry not to know. Writing the Unthinkable The reporter gnaws his knuckle, as she speaks. He tries to write a picture of her children, boy and girl, not old enough to spell their names. They stand on either side of her, tee shirts worn so gauzy with their handing down they don’t disguise the sharp protrusion of a shoulder bone. Odd, he thinks, the boy, the bigger child, leans into her, encircles her with both his arms. The girl is steady on her feet, defies his sympathy and gives no quarter with her gaze. His jottings fill a page: covid riding visitors into the houses huddling cheek by jowl; barefaced brownstones muffling tragedy as anger grows; children escaping to spill down stoops in search of play forbidden many months; soup kitchens running out of soup. He can’t do anything to right the year but write. It makes him cry but he will start his story with the question she has thrust at him at last: “How do I choose which child to feed today?”  Nan Meneely is a Connecticut poet whose career in teaching and training culminated in twenty years with the Federal Emergency Management Agency where she managed programs in support of disaster response and recovery. Her first publication, Letter from Italy, 1944, was noted by the Hartford Courant as one of thirteen important books by Connecticut writers in 2013. Her second book, Simple Absence, published hours before the pandemic reached American shores, was nominated for the National Book Award.
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