Click here to see the beautiful cover, read an excerpt, and find out more about my new novel Telephone of the Tree, officially in the world on May 7. 

These days I keep looking at a photo of a friend’s baby lying on a blanket as his father reads Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to him. The baby is tiny, and the expression on his face is pure wonder. Astonishment. Happiness. As if the book and his father and the words and the blanket and the world, the whole entire world, this same world that most of us later learn to walk through with our guard up, are just one big delight.

Naïve, by 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?

Click here for more information about Tim Seibles. “Naive” was first published on the American Academy of Poet’s Poem-a-Day site in 2024.

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