We googled profit and found
a multitude of sites, an infinity of words.
Market, free market, market forces
and Share Market, where no-one wants to share.
Interest rates, loans, mortgage, prime mortgage
mortgage belt, tighten your belt, belt you wife.
Bulls and Bears, profit and loss,
hedge funds becoming bushfires,
unbecoming greed becoming hedged, wedged
between profit and unimaginable loss.
As it was in the beginning, they say
so it will ever be.
We googled prophet and found
Abraham with an aged wife, Ezekiel, ecstatic in the fire
and a man nailed in agony to a tree.
We found Mohammed, the Buddha
Martin Luther King who had a dream and
Desmond Tutu, incandescent with forgiveness.
T.S. Eliot, in a jingle, foretold the slow dying
that scientists observe in arctic seas and polar ice
and algorithms, burdened with despair.
All sweetly human. Flesh encasing mind and spirit.
The English tongue must stand accused
if we fail to find the way because we
don’t know how to spell.