Training With Words

March 4, 2025

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