Poem city poet Ellen Deckwitz about Saskia Uylenburgh

Read the poem below:

Some questions for Saskia

Were you actually a morning person? Didn’t you prefer to stay in bed
when behind the shutters the noises of the street already started?

Was he strict because he could work from the first light and even back then
time already money was? Did you talk to each other

when you posed, when he put pearls that you couldn't afford
around your neck with a brush?

Was the job sometimes interrupted by lovemaking? Or were the hours
too precious during the day and did he intend love for the night,

the blood-warm black in which he could no longer be distracted
by the behavior of shadows and the flames of candles? How they

made shades on your skin, made the color on your cheeks change
from shellpink to glowing sepia?

You always have to share a painter with the light. But at night
he’s yours. Then it is finally no longer about sight but about touch,

the smell of your hair, what sounds are released while you whisper
that the little one might be awakened. Then there are the layers of taste

from your skin, the elderflower scent of your armpits, the salt
in the trench of your navel. All experiences

which he did not know how to capture and because of that
loved them even more.

What must it have been like for him, on that day in June?
When you were lowered into the shadows in this place?

Your face no longer broke free like a portrait
from the tones of twilight. How after that

every year on an early morning in March the sun on your stone
knocked like a child's hand on a gate, begging to come play outside

and you didn't come out. Stayed entwined with the dark
where you once found each other,

the dark in which he really saw you.

Ellen Deckwitz