Nobody gets rescued in this short poem. Its speaker admits to wanting something that can't be willed: to see their parents as superheroes, "good and invincible," the kind who "would save the day no matter what." The speaker can't manage it. What they see instead is a pair of ordinary people, and the last three lines make clear that ordinary is not the worst of it. The central idea is the gap between the parents the speaker was supposed to have and the ones they actually live with, a gap that is moral as well as emotional.
The first line is the most carefully built. "I really wish that I thought my parents were superheroes" is not a wish that the parents were heroes. It is a wish to be able to believe it. That small twist carries a lot: the speaker knows belief can't be chosen, and the casual "really" makes the admission sound honest and a little tired. It also sets up the title, "Eyes of a Child." The speaker is asking for the eyes they no longer have, or never had. The title can be read two ways, though. A child's eyes are innocent, but they are also unusually clear, and the poem may suggest that what the speaker sees is simply what is there.
The poem borrows the vocabulary of comic books and films and then turns it against itself. "Save the day" is a deliberately worn phrase, the sort of cliché that belongs in a children's story. "Civilians" is more pointed. In superhero tales, civilians are the people behind the barrier, the ones who need saving and never do the saving. Calling the parents civilians demotes them from heroes to bystanders. Then comes "gawk," an ugly, slightly contemptuous verb that makes them rubberneckers, watching "evil plots" as a spectacle. The plain phrase "go home" follows, and home is where the poem turns dark.
The structure supports this turn. The poem is a single unpunctuated sentence in lowercase, split evenly at the word "but." The first three lines hold the fantasy. The second line ends on a dangling "and," as if the list of virtues could go on forever, which is how a child's idea of a parent tends to work. After "but" the language gets blunter. The fifth line is the longest and the harshest in sound, with the hard consonants of "gawk," "plots" and "go" jammed together. The last line is short and clipped. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and that suits a poem that wants to sound deadpan. A chime at the line endings would make it sound like a game, and the flat, almost text-message tone makes the final accusation hit harder.
Two small words do a lot of work. "Just" appears twice, and it shifts meaning. In "always just been people" it means *merely*, a deflating word that strips away the superhero glamour. In "just to act like villains" it sounds almost casual, as though becoming a villain were the reason for going home, or an afterthought. "Act" is ambiguous too: the parents might behave like villains, or they might be pretending to be them. And the poem ends on "themselves," a word that turns the judgment back on the parents' own natures. "Always" matters as well. The parents have *always* been just people, so this is not a fall from innocence. The speaker mourns an illusion they never had.
The poem doesn't say what happens at home, and that restraint is its smartest choice. The imagery suggests some kind of harm, but the speaker gives no scene, no example and no explanation. We are left with the contrast between the public face (curious, passive, harmless) and the private one (villainous), and the reader has to imagine the rest.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. Plenty of writing about growing up describes the moment you realize your parents are not perfect. This poem says something harder. The speaker's complaint is not that the parents fail to be invincible, which would be a normal disappointment. The complaint is that they fail to be decent, and that they watch evil from a distance while practicing it at close range. It makes this point in six lines, using the language of children's entertainment, which gives it a bitter irony. By the end, the title's "eyes of a child" read less like an innocent way of seeing than like a clear one.