Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options

What you look hard at looks back hard at you.
As in this icon, where the child with the deer-
Brown eyes gazes at something just beyond your view,
This child king who spreads blessing everywhere.

Blood of his mother’s blood, bone of her bone.
Identical the mouth, the nose, the eyes.
You can see he is his mother’s son, and hers alone,
In any way one’s DNA supplies.

If too he is his Father’s Son, how can you know
But by what burns behind the gaze, or in
The innocence of blessing? And even then there’s no
Way to know until you touch the mystery within.

And for that you will have first to understand
What it is you gaze at with the same dim eyes
Too long glutted on the sensual, the bland,
The million million flyspecked buzzing lies.

The scrim of sight is dimmed with sick desire.
The Buddha knew this, and Blake, and Dante too.
How hard, O how very hard to re-ignite the fire,
The inner flame that lets us look upon these two,

These two whose gaze gives back peace again,
But only if we learn to turn the outward gaze into
The gaze within, the child’s eyes remembering the When,
The mother’s doe-brown eyes as she turns to gaze at you.

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

“Pope Francis is the pope of the people,” Rosa de los Ríos told America in Spanish before the funeral Mass. “He is very close to the people.... That’s why he was so loved. People felt he was very close to them.”
J.D. Long GarcíaApril 26, 2025
Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy met inside St. Peter’s Basilica ahead of the funeral for Pope Francis on the morning of April 26.
Associated PressApril 26, 2025
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re’s homily for the funeral of Pope Francis.
America StaffApril 26, 2025
The day before he died, Pope Francis made one final circuit through St. Peter’s Square in his popemobile. “That’s my last image of him alive,” Gerry O’Connell remembered. “He drove among the people.”