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Best Poems Written by Heather Chernen

Below are the all-time best Heather Chernen poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Heather Chernen Poem

Although Fertile Were the Fields

Although fertile were the fields, I plowed
That self-same earth lies barren now;
 Barren evermore.
 Still I shall not fear the wrath of God or Anyman
 For my seeds were sown in the wild and unsullied season
 Albeit the earth which absorbed the substance of my labors
  Yields neither fruit nor flower.

   Still what remains behind us after we have passed u nto nothing
  Is it the perception of ourselves by others
   Or the small and humble things that are the substance of my struggle?
   
    Although tertile were the fields I plowed
    That self-same earth lies batrren now;
     Barren evermore.
     Still I shall not fear the wrath of God or Anyman
     For my seedswere sown in the wild and unsullied season
     Albeit the earth which absorbed the substance of my loabors
      Yields neither fruit nor flower.

Details | Heather Chernen Poem

Epitaph of An Addict

Stalking him,
Always now,
In the daylight, or down city street, no matter.
Sleek- a panther, its coat cast obsidian under a moon in anarchy.

Behind him, or in front,
Clutching deeply until each appendage of self falls victim;
The brain, the belly
And the heart unwittingly surrenders.
And the heart.

For although it assuages his fear
It absorbs the essence of the spirit.
It has given inexplicable sorrow a name.
And although the symptoms are in juxtaposition
Nonetheless it defines the nature of his disease;
In this he has found the substance for his epitaph.

And you,  who are behooved by deadly youth's penchant for morbidity,
Seize now, his eyes, glance for glance,
And answer this question which binds his life to a name.

Who can be so blind as to assume
That one is amongst the living because you see him walking?
B ecause his lungs expand and so much toxic air is absobed
And expelled?

Details | Heather Chernen Poem

And This Flag I Have Damned So Longly

And this flag I have damned so longly,
This rag, and nothing more,
While death-mock-racy raved and raved and avenged its bloodthirst
 Over and over,
  Since the inception of a country, with George and Martha and Mary
  With nothing save civility, in drawingrooms and battlefields
   Is justified by that gentle face, somehow justified as being no longer a damnation
   But the stuff of a citizenry, with that face, and the mulatoo's face, sad, overgrown Abe
   and all of his honesty,
   How proud I am of the flag I never had,
   Of the society I spent decades criminalizing, cursing
   And of all the possibilities inherent in Innocence:
     That is the face of my President
     And this is my tattered flag!

Details | Heather Chernen Poem

As Consistent As the Season

Her existence was reduced to a composite
Of scenes:
As consistent as the seasons,
As emperical as the earth she trod on;
As irremediable as memory,
And the obliviation of memory,
Slowly, in the mind.

As to the pattern of droll days and night dreams-
There was no help for it,
No terminus-
Although oftimes she would beseech God and God, and God
And oh my God,  but nothing changed
Just winter to spring and fertility and rampant dryness in the clime
Where nothing seemed to live any better than she did.
She would find herself smirking the dichotomy between her beliefs
And the reality that confronted her,
For, in truth, her beliefs availed nothing and nothing
And nothing was propogated by Lifelessness in dead air,
And she was incredulous that this were so.

Was the universe then but a brute and senseless phantasm?
An ambience seduced and won by Caliban
Leaving all men adrift,
Linked incongrously to their glistening sphere
Such that mortal existence was, but a composite of scenes,
Cyclical, senseless, horrific;
As consistent as the seasons;
As emperical as the earth men trod on,
As irremediable as memory;
And the obliviation of memory,
Slowly, slowly, slowly in the mind.

Details | Heather Chernen Poem

He Had Not Meant To Drift

He had not meant to drift
Yet he could not avert the dreaded nature of his anarchic days;
The craven, inebriated nights wherein all manifestations of Time
 Slipped away from him.
 Yet memory remained entrenched in the sensibility he sought to dull
  As did the cruel actuality of his youth, a negation.

   He was not as gauche, nor as ugly as he feared,
   And even, in his better days,
    Not as handsome as he wished.
    He was a hybrid entity, splintered at the nucleus,
    An estranged dark, stoic thing,
    And the intervention of others upon the isolate continuum of a self embellished
    In an unameable lattitude
    Solidified his existence to a fate that was never his.
    For Narcissism had been his fatality, and he knew it,
    And he had never meant to be an affront to God.

     Still some amorphous presentiment, which emerged, then retreated,
      Impelled him to nourish whatever innocence remained in him,
      As if that  cruel malady could  be ingested, assimilated, dart through
      The air into his trembling hands
       If only he could coerce his muscles into consummating the task.

      A response to a certain common loss
      Compelled him to frequent one particular deviant tavern;
       A "brother" is what he said he needed so desperately to find;
       How essentially insipid he must have been to believe that " a brother"
       Could be found in that dank, windowless chasm.
 
       Rendered ill, towards closing time,
       He wondered which had succumbed easier to the whims
       Of the foul wind that encircled him-
       Was it soul, or physignomy,
        Or was his Nemesis the streets, which he hit like clock-work
        Moments before this days death,  and dawn.

       There was no plan to his existence;
        He simply went with the tide, however frenetic, the moon
        That made it dance,
         Such was his Life,
         An atrophied thing,
          Remotely adherent to his quest before his corruption:
         To acknowledge, even in the most solemn silence,
          His inalienable right to be as he was.

Details | Heather Chernen Poem

Still It Is Possible To Have a Conscience

Still it is possible to have a conscience
 Amidst the conscienceless,
 Then you're on your own
  Good-luck-buddy.

   Avaricious protoplasm spins madly out of control
   Under an aching sky,
    Vapor and dusk.
    But that which is rooted in things dead
     Drains the living of its intrinsic essence
     Devoid of remorse, loathe for sorrow,
     There are ties rooted in memory,
      Thicker than water, just as ephemeral.

        Ties that strangle when no facet of comprehension
        Encapsulate tthe ties that bind.
         But I am not rooted in things dead
         Nor do I wish to die in consideration of the retrospective flight
         From sorrow,
         As if the mob's approbation or wrath
          Ever impelled the wonderment rooted in things beautiful
          Engorged in my eyes.