A-Z Challenge, H is for Handmade Blade

"Handmade Blade, Child's Balloon"

This is a new painting, which is, as of yet, UNFINISHED.

The allusion is to the song by Bob Dylan, from which I quote:

"Darkness at the break of noon

shadows even the silver spoon

the handmade blade, the child's balloon,

eclipses both the sun and moon"

I will not explain it further because I assume you will understand without explication.

And for National poetry Month:

Hunting the Snipe of Sleep

As water seeps through my nightgown, and mud,

pungent and black, clings to my fingers, I scrabble slowly

toward dawn. I crawl through dark swamps. Winged

as a curlew, long-beaked as a woodcock,

sleep dives whistling through the shattered night.

Burdocks and beggars ticks

burrow into my hair, biting me

with tiny pointed teeth.

I carry a snare for the snipe

of sleep, but when it swoops by and I reach

to snag it, my fingers pass, ethereal, through

ghostly feathers, intangible as the clouds

of fog that drift past, damp, taunting

and utterly ungraspable. Dreams tumble by,

hauntingly near but always beyond reach.

They refuse to descend into my parched eyes.

Gibbering voices of dream phantoms

talk in tongues, in unlearned or unknown languages

while aurora-colored curtains flutter

around my face in tatters. Warm snow

drifts from the sky, but never touches my face.

Night tears itself in strips, shreds itself into confettis

of longing. Never will the snipe of sleep

be domesticated, it can neither be captured

nor kept. Beyond feral, beyond savage,

it ranges, elusive, toothy, taloned and mean.

Insomnia sucks, leechlike, shrinking

the cinder of my heart.