She was the witch of Wall Street.
Finance was her blood, her bones, and her breath.
She spun fortunes from her fingers.

No one knew how she came to the market.
It was her one great secret, the six years between her eighteenth birthday and her twenty-fourth.
Those twenty-two hundred days watched from her brown eyes.
She knew that witchcraft was Mystery.

She raised towers of wealth.
She sculpted nudes and figures in the trading of shares.
Hog futures soared: an eye!
Steel fell: a graceful ankle!
In ten years she had driven six men to suicide.
In ten years she had moulded her Galatea.

She withdrew onto the opulent estate she had built.
Her Galatea went with her.
The market knew no more that frightful shape!
The wild papers of her presence settled.

The witch worked in finer materials, to more subtle ends, higher art.
She was a force upon the earth; a robber baron, a magnate, a dynasty.
Now nations she ruined, now governments, now empires.
The goddess she had created stood behind her and whispered into her ear.

She was Galatea’s only acolyte.
Though new-formed, there was no cult more esoteric.
Though market-born, no god more powerful.