Lynn Tait
Self-Reflections as One Door Opens
How many times must I walk through gateways leading to the next opening or closing? There’s some serious repetition here.
Some days, believe entering and leaving leads to change, learning curves will straighten out, a different world view born. Something wonderful to gaze on besides my navel…
Gold W. Lynn Tait arrives at vision by way of threshold—the gate, the doorway, the in-between space where what we have been and what we might become stand briefly face to face.
Her poem “Self-Reflections as One Door Opens” is an ekphrastic work, meaning it is written in direct response to visual art. The tradition of ekphrasis—from the Greek, meaning description or vivid representation—has a long history in poetry, from Keats’s meditation on a Grecian urn to W.H. Auden’s engagement with Bruegel’s Icarus. Lynn brings her own irreverent intelligence to the form. Her two source images are a photograph of the vermilion Torii Gates of Kyoto, Japan—the sacred arches of Shinto tradition that mark the passage from the mundane into the divine—and Hilma af Klint’s “Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece,” a large-scale abstract painting from 1915 in which geometric form and spiritual symbolism converge. The pairing is unexpected and entirely fitting. Both images are concerned with the unseen: what lies beyond the threshold, what cannot quite be named but can nonetheless be moved toward.
What Lynn does with these twin prompts is characteristically her own. The poem does not describe the images so much as think through them, using their visual logic as a scaffold for an interior reckoning. The speaker is wry and self-aware, not above puncturing solemnity with a well-placed observation, and the poem balances the serious and the playful with the ease of a writer who has long understood that wit and vulnerability are not opposites. Readers will recognize something of themselves in the voice—its impatience, its longing, its refusal to pretend that the path forward is simpler than it is. The poem moves through shifting registers—abstract and concrete, comic and earnest, inward and outward—and arrives at a point where the reader must ultimately decide how to read.
The American poet Kim Addonizio, whom Lynn cites as a particular influence, works in a similarly confessional and formally limber mode—poems that are streetwise and emotionally unguarded, that locate the sacred in the difficult and the everyday, and that earn their grace through unflinching honesty rather than decoration. Lynn’s voice carries that same quality: sharp enough to cut, and tender enough to matter.
Vision, in this poem, is not clarity but courage—the willingness to keep walking through gates, to look at what follows, and to make a choice about what to do with it. The poem asks us to consider our own thresholds and the shadows that accompany us across them.
Lynn Tait is a poet and photographer residing in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Aamjiwnaang First Nations. She is the author of “You Break It You Buy It” (Guernica Editions, 2023), available in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Fire, FreeFall, Vallum, CV2, Literary Review of Canada, and over 100 North American anthologies. Her digital photo art has appeared on the covers of 10 books and in Still Point Arts Quarterly.
Lynn Tait is the Gold Writer of the ArtAscent “Vision” call for writers. To see the full body of work and profile, get a copy of the 2026 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal “Vision” issue.
