Would the real Adam Smith please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up —
not the one on the banknote,
not the one the hedge funds quote,
not the invisible hand waved over every cut,
every closure, every child left behind
by the logic of the market
these shouldn't stand.
───
The landlord that has never queued.
Never been refused.
Never felt powerless,
never depended on a stranger's kindness,
never needed the world to be generous
and waited to find out if it was.
He reaps where he never sowed —
Smith said so, plainly.
Nobody put that on a tote bag.
The priest that preaches prosperity gospel,
God's favour measured in square footage,
answerable to no congregation,
having given up even the pretence
of tending his flock.
The politician says the market will sort it.
He stopped reading at the index.
Wealth held tightly
produces one
who reads every human
as a potential threat to what he owns.
Every outstretched hand a claim.
Every stranger a calculation about profit and loss.
Who built the insulation first:
the gated entrance, the private floor,
the car that never stops in traffic.
Then, insulated from pain,
distance did its worst.
Please don't stand.
───
The real Adam Smith never married,
lived with his mother.
Came back to her.
When she died, said she was his only source of happiness
and burned his manuscripts
as if the work had been for her all along.
He sat beside Margaret Douglas at a kitchen table in Kirkcaldy —
not a high table —
and learned that sympathy
is a muscle,
and muscles atrophy
in the absence of use.
Jane Goodall sat in the forest sixty years,
watching chimpanzees grieve their dead.
She never stopped going back.
Shakyamuni had the palace, the wife, the child —
walked away
because he could not unfeel
what he had seen:
the old man, the sick man, the corpse.
cannot build compassion from comfort.
we have to have shivered first.
The awkward child of a single mother
learned the world by watching her manage it alone —
grew up knowing someone will come for you,
that the world at its foundation is retrievable,
that trust is the only rational response
to having been found.
───
He wrote it two hundred and fifty years ago.
there are principles in our nature
which interest us in the fortune of others
and render their happiness
necessary to our own.
Kindness, strangely — Necessary.
Has always been standing there.
Would the real Adam Smith please stand up.