Why hold your breath? Because there are events in human life that can only be understood in a state of utmost concentration and tension, for example, in extreme despair or in the face of absurd beauty. And where, I ask, would both (beauty and despair) be better placed than in poetry? Gerlind Reinshagen has written many plays, radio dramas, novels, and stories over fifty years - and always also poems. For the first time collected, it becomes clear that they form an integral part of her work - courageous and highly sensitive lyrical close-ups of characters, situations, and moods that we have encountered, in one way or another, not only in the world of her texts. However, the poem "Approach to a Person" is both powerful and pure, a shy yet determined journey into the castle of the soul, as Teresa of Avila would describe it.