The End of Suffering

In the matter of children—I didn't want
to inflict on mine the kinds of expectations

children of my generation unfailingly got from our
own parents: you will be a doctor, you will be a nurse,

you will be a lawyer or else; you will enter the nunnery 
or become a priest so there will be someone who 

can plead our case in the afterlife. At least one
of mine says she doesn't want to have any children,

given the state of the world. Which is to say, 
the decimation of human and nonhuman life,  

the terrible cruelties and hatreds that daily fly 
through the air— landing as spit on the dusky 

cheek of a woman on a train, falling as a rain 
of bombs on the defenceless sleeping in refugee 

camps. A grandfather kicked in the shins, a woman
thrown to the ground in the street—hate and harm,

harm and hate, their letters almost interchangeable.
A poet told of traveling through the nearly impossible 

dark where a deer lay rigid on a mountain 
road, the unborn fawn still warm inside her. 

Why is the end of suffering promised as a heaven 
no one can see, but that many seem so certain of?