You may not be familiar with the poet William Cowper. But his best-known work, "Light Shining Out Of Darkness," contains lines that will certainly ring a bell—lines like:

The deity isn’t the only one who moves in a mysterious way. Wallstreetpoet visitors know that markets do as well, driven by that all-knowing, all-wise collective force that Adam Smith termed the Invisible Hand.

That Hand has been dishing out some nasty whacks of late. But we all know it’s for our own good, and in the end, everything will come out right. (You do know that, don’t you?) In any case, the following parody of Cowper’s "Light Shining Out Of Darkness," which I dedicate to Smith, is called "Keeping The Faith."

Keeping The Faith

Markets can take a torturous path,
Their purposes to achieve;
Between the sellers’ fearful wrath,
And buyers fulsome greed.

But there is an Invisible Hand
That never gets it wrong,
Makes sure that things right side do land,
Before life’s closing gong.

Nay saving seers should thus back off
And stop their carping angst
Before a greater will caps doff
And ease up on their rants.

No smarts can gauge the Great Hand’s ways,
You gotta just believe
That after you’ve traversed this maze
Good things you will receive.

In fact all questions disappear,
When looking back not front;
In retrospect all things are clear,
The past’s your learning font.

So drop religion if you must,
Of politics have none;
But give the Market your blind trust,
And hope it’s not a con.

********

© Michael Silverstein