The Parable of the Mustard Seed
Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of God? ... It is like a grain of
mustard seed: which when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds
that be in the earth. But ... it groweth up, and becometh greater than all
herbs, and shooteth outgreat branches, so that the fowls of the air may lodge
under the shadow of it.
                        —Mark 4:30-32

+Not-yet-irruptive, unparousial noon:
something's nested and indeterminable in the roadside mustard shrub

but there's no fowle of heaven lodged and sheltered there.
A thousand black pellet seeds

reissue and disperse from its gnawed, cruciferous blooms.

+The tyme is fulfilled, and the kyngdoom

of God schal come nyy?
But the eschatos, the last one, tarries and sojourns
among alabaster jars of spikenard ointment,
among leperskins and myrrh-bearing women.

+Something's brooded in the lobed-
leafed, hair-spiked
rosettes of birdsrape mustard, something
all consonant, unvowelled and augural, among seeds
germinal and ready to be crushed.

+Now the psalters crumble and lutes fall away.
The scatomancer, for further droppings, watches and abides.

You who exist, be like
those who do not exist, says the Secret Gospel.

+Whereunto shall we liken

this three-foot golden weedtuft mustard shrub,
some grizzled
hatchling's scratched-out hunger cry inside

and then inside?

Say we say it is like the pullulating kingdom—
over the summer-abandoned schoolyard—
of the tough bunched green
fists of unripenable fig.

+Let the crickets take their gutload. Let the mustard
scrub unspill its self-profusion, grain by mote-sized grain.
Let its underleaf warble and unmoving wing-shiver
speak not
without a parable.
Some things only dissimilitude can tell.

Now the knives are at my fatlings' throats. And all things are ready.

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Copyright © 2012 Bruce Beasley All rights reserved
from Theophobia
BOA Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission