Poem-a-Day - "Naïve" by Tim Seibles

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March 19, 2024 
 

Naïve

Tim Seibles
I love you but I don’t know you
               —Mennonite Woman

When I was seven, I walked home
with Dereck DeLarge, my arm
 
slung over his skinny shoulders,
after-school sun buffing our lunch boxes.
 
So easy, that gesture, so light— 
the kind of love that lands like a leaf.
 
It was 1963.  
We were two black boys
 
whose snaggle-toothed grins 
held a thousand giggles.
 
Remember? Remember
wanting to play
 
every minute, as if that 
was why we were born?
 
Those hands that bring us
shouting into this life
 
must open like a fanfare 
of big band horns.
 
Though this world is nothing
 
like where we’d been, 
we come anyway, astonished
 
as if to Mardi Gras in full swing.
There must be a time
 
when a child’s heart builds 
a chocolate sunflower
 
while katydids burnish the day
with their busy wings.
 
This itching fury that 
holds me now—this knowing
 
the early welcome
that once lived inside me
 
was somehow sent away:
how I talk myself back
 
into all the regular disguises
but still walk these streets
 
believing in the weather
of the unruined heart.
 
My friends, with crow’s feet
edging their eyes,
 
keep looking for a kinder
city, though they don’t
 
want to seem naïve.
When was the last time
 
you wrapped your arm
around someone’s shoulder
 
and walked him home?

Copyright © 2024 by Tim Seibles. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 19, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“The initial inspiration for ‘Naïve’ was the statement by the Mennonite woman featured in the epigraph. Just the idea that someone—in these times—could say, ‘I love you, but I don’t know you,’ simply touched my heart. Almost immediately, I began to think of my own innocence, much of it lost in adolescence. This brought to mind Dereck DeLarge, one of my best friends in elementary school. I hadn’t thought about him in probably forty years. We were such crazy bubbleheads, so much like puppies really. It’s hard not to wonder where such sweetness goes and what being an adult really asks of us.”
—Tim Seibles

Tim Seibles

Tim Seibles is the author of Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems (Etruscan Press, 2022) and Fast Animal (Etruscan Press, 2012), winner of both the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for Poetry, and a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. Seibles was the poet laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia.

Voodoo Libretto
Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems
(Etruscan Press, 2022)

“The Lost Woods as Elegy for Black Childhood” by Derrick Austin
read more

“All Black Boys Look Alike” by John Warner Smith
read more

Thanks to Kendra DeColo, author of I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World (BOA Editions, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about DeColo’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.
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