Saskia in The Night Watch, by Ella Leith

Officers and other civic guardsmen of District II in Amsterdam, under the command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, known as ‘The Night Watch’ by Rembrandt van Rijn (Netherlands) 1642.

Saskia in The Night Watch

The master of light and dark
Mourned her as he mulled
His pigments, and wept
As he dead-coloured the canvas,
As vast as the gap she’d left in him.

But now, leaning on his mahl stick,
He lets the light in his brush catch her
And places her, in miniature,
Right in the middle of a militia,
Her golden gaze drifting out and away.

In chiaroscuro, he colours the dead.
Her face catches the light
Bringing into the night the brightness of dawn.

Ella Leith

This poem was highly commended in the Pen Nib International Competition 2021. 
​
Ella Leith (she/her) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and occasional poetry. Her work tends to draw on her background in folklore and oral histories, exploring how the past, the imagined and the uncanny exist in the present and the mundane. Her work has been published in The Kitchen Table Quarterly, The Icarus Collective, and Gramarye, and she is currently querying her first novel. Originally from the Midlands of England, she now lives in Malta with her partner, a haunted terracotta bust, and several hundred notebooks. Find links to her work at www.ellaleith.com