As the reality of the horror in Israel has slowly unfolded in recent days, I have repeatedly heard the plea, “Don’t look away.” It’s a rejoinder to the impulse to shield our eyes from the perverse and evil images we can’t conceive of and don’t wish to dwell on. The plea is well-founded. If the words “never again” have any meaning, we can’t look away from what is happening today. To respond to evil, we have to acknowledge it. We have to look at it.
Yet I also understand the impulse to look away — to attempt to guard our hearts and the hearts of those we love, especially of our children. One of my favorite poems, “Child” by Sylvia Plath, perfectly captures this:
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new
Whose name you meditate —
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little
Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical
Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.
Published in 1963, the poem is about a parent’s love for a child and the desire to fill that child’s world with only beauty — with age-appropriate “color and ducks” and images “grand and classical.”
Yet the poem also aptly captures what so many of us are feeling about the state of the world today. It’s a “dark ceiling without a star,” a black hole of badness that leaves us helplessly wringing our hands, with no
