Daniel Kraft

Memoir of a Psychiatric Hospitalization

I am tired of being just another
solitary Jonah. I can remember days
that shimmered bright as music, as
Bach’s fugues, time alchemized to gold,
and even when those days had passed
like ships drooling across the lip
of the horizon and I hid beneath the deck,
disconsolate, enough of me was left
that I could try to hide; the sea’s
shushing against the hull
reminded me of waves against the rock
shore of myself. Here’s none of that—
no self, no tides, the buoys all gone dark
or else revealed as dreams. Once the tomatoes
reddened in their cages and I saw them,
saw them with these eyes that have
forgotten how to read the word for sun.
If some God still exists enough
to make whatever I am living in
vomit me onto land then I will be
a stranger to myself, and I will celebrate
because a self will be distant and actual,
unknowable as any other stranger
looking down, walking by on the dusk-
lit street, but it will be there,
near enough to touch, and real.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia. His poems, essays, and translations of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry appear in many publications including the Kenyon Review, Image, Poetry Ireland Review, Jewish Currents, and Slate. More is available at danieljkraft.com, or at his newsletter of Yiddish poetry in translation, danielkraft.substack.com.