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.