Like Silver Star-dust, Inked and Versed

2025 November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 12

For the 2025 November PAD Chapbook Challenge, 

poets write a poem a day in the month of November. 

Day 12 is to pick a color and write a poem.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads,

and as we pass through them

they prove to be many-coloured lenses

which paint the world their own hue

and each shows only what lies in its focus...

~Ralph Waldo Emerson~ 

Through these many coloured lenses

poems are born...

Sometimes the poem glides and skims

The page with rainbow shards and hymns...

Sometimes the poem leaps and vaults

And turns cartwheels and somersaults 

And dazzles pages with a burst

Of silver star-dust, inked and versed 

Sometimes the poem sobs and groans

And seeps like a gray chill, through bones

And weeps upon the page that wears

The charcoal whispering of prayers 

Sometimes the poem glints and gleams

And rolls through laughter's joy like streams

Of gold, rushing the barren page

Through vistas of purple and sage

Sometimes the poem balks and scowls

Resisting consonants and vowels

The page, like a black thundercloud

The poet, broken, blind and bowed

Sometimes the poem glides and skims

The page with rainbow shards and hymns

And the blithe poet is immersed

In silver star-dust, inked and versed 

Janet Martin