The Parable of the Sower – Jacob Tarasenko

 

The first few fell

and found hard ground

become a glaciated plane

there in arid wait to lay

exposed

their potential verdure

stemmed

and then

a sable swooping billow blew

up and upwards out of hell

bent on death and brought with it

a Screwtape cotérie composed

of shades and wraiths

and revenants

with ice-pick beaks

and sickle claws

to sickly gorge

and only ceased

when each

was gone

 

The next group

peppered pregnant dirt

fertile with a certain

simple

steppe-soil promise

of provision

‘we will house you’

crowed the loamy fecund bed

so hapless shoots were shot straight down

and sought their routes

through miniscule foramina

which proved too shallow

above a bedrock bulwark

that sat in tacit abrogation

complicit

warped and wilted

brought an Autumn

the tallest of them tried to thrive

above the husks

but died as well

then blew away

 

Some were scattered

where woody stalks stood

and weedy tendrils stretched already

sucking sun and feeding foreign

blooms from which our bees

do not object to borrow pollen

sprouted spritely

all about the other roots

to burgeon

even bloom

and grew until a thorny roof

made remonstrations

if only imperceptibly

constricted liquid breath

in xylem sheath

that stultifying vine noose met

their every fateful measure

with ever more pressure

élan vital purloined

slowly

slyly

replaced with rot

 

And yet there was another lot

the last

‘still other’ they would claim He named them

all it took was goodly earth

sun and water

nothing other

to produce a bounty

thirty or a hundred times

their worth was the reward

or so

at least

said He who sowed them

but even twice should prove enough

when three from four

succumb to being

stolen

starved

or scorched

 

Download a pdf of ‘The Parable Of The Sower’

Jacob Tarasenko

J.A. Tarasenko is a sometimes philosopher-poet who has also produced scripts and copy as head writer for Sydney's Negative Films. Today, he prefers to let his writing speak for both itself and himself, but is always working on something, in the least simply because art is never finished - only abandoned.