COMPASSION - Note to my Unborn Child

I hope you will be seduced by the enchantment of learning
And bedazzled by the alluring possibilities trapped in its bosom
Education will teach you many isms:
Economics; how to gather resources to meet your needs
Entrepreneurship; how to multiply wealth and court Abundance
Society too will impress certain ways upon your mind:
Doctors save lives; they are rewarded with class and comfort
Lawyers plead cases; they are treated with grandeur and respect
Engineers create edifices and bridges; civilisation needs them
So many ways to learn and how they profit you
 
Compassion isn’t a job, you may not be taught;
It is not a class, comfort or respectable thing, it hardly profits you
But Child, take from learning its greatest lesson:
Its luxury; the ability to choose
Its elixir; the power of reason
Choose not the ways which add mere things to your state,
Or those caustic red-herrings about Happiness’ true home
Use the charm of reason to find for yourself that life’s true essence
Cannot consist only in things, or temporal states alone
 
Know, child, that compassion is a hard and lonely path
For ‘me’ and ‘I’ are the natural uses of man
But reason, good reason should prompt you to the higher life;
Where you give, give and give again
And expect neither profit nor material gain
No other joy compares, not even close
To when you lighten a needy face with a selfless deed
Child, it is true what they say; you haven’t lived a day
Until you lend a hand to a soul who can never repay
Child, compassion isn’t ‘profitable’, you might never be taught
But I hope it remains your path, even if everyone deems it difficult

Poem Credit - Abayomi Ojo