
Training With Words
Sangha member Debra Elise Wöhrmann regularly selects a poem to share on our website. For this selection, Debra writes:
Here’s a poem by Nancy Miller Gomez that appreciates how the growth of an apple seedling brings life to men “doing time” in prison. The poem invites us to contemplate how we are each growing and can be inspired, fed, and freed from whatever bars keep us captive—from mistakes we’ve made, regrets we must forgive, anger, lust, jealousy. I imagine this small seedling, nourished daily by these men, a gift and glint of life. Emptiness, you might call it. Interbeing. Miracle. Thank you.
GROWING APPLES
by Nancy Miller Gomez
There is big excitement in C block today:
On the window sill,
in a plastic ice cream cup
a little plant is growing.
This is all the men want to talk about:
how an apple seed germinated
in a crack of damp concrete;
how they tore open tea bags
to collect the leaves, leached them
in water, then laid the sprout onto the bed
made of Lipton. How this finger of spring
dug one delicate root down
into the dark fannings and now
two small sleeves of green
are pushing out from the emerging tip.
The men are tipsy with this miracle.
Each morning, one by one,
they go to the window and check
the progress of the struggling plant.
All through the day they return
to stand over the seedling
and whisper.
© from How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, edited by James Crews, 2021