Gwyneth Lewis (b.1959) was born in Cardiff. She studied English at Cambridge, creative writing at Columbia University in New York City, and wrote a doctorate on Iolo Morganwg at Oxford. She has published five collections of poetry, three in Welsh and two in English: Parables and Faxes (Bloodaxe, 1995, short-listed for the Forward Prize and winner of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize), Zero Gravity (Bloodaxe, 1998, a PBS Recommendation), Sonedau Redsa (Gomer, 1990), Cyfrif Un ac Un yn Dri (Barddas, 1996) and Y Llofrudd Iaith (Barddas, 1999). Her last four books were shortlisted for Welsh Book of the Year. She lives in Cardiff. Pentecost The Lord wants me to go to Florida. I shall cross the border with the mercury thieves, as foretold in the faxes and prophecies, and the checkpoint angel of Estonia will have alerted the uniformed birds to act unnatural and distract the guards so I pass unhindered. My glossolalia shall be my passport - I shall taste the tang of travel on the atlas of my tongue - salt Poland, sour Denmark and sweet Vienna and all men in the Spirit shall understand that, in His wisdom, the Lord has sent a slip of a girl to save great Florida. I'll tear through Europe like a standing flame, not pausing for long, except to rename the occasional city; in Sofia thousands converted and hundreds slain in the Holy Spirit along the Seine. My life is your chronicle; O Florida revived, look forward to your past and prepare your perpetual Pentecost of golf course and freeway, shopping mall and car so the fires that are burning in the orange groves turn light into sweetness and the huddled graves are hives of the future - an America spelt plainly, translated in the Everglades where palm fruit hang like hand grenades ready to rip whole treatises of air. Then the S in the tail of the crocodile will make perfect sense to the bibliophile who will study this land, his second Torah. All this was revealed. Now I wait for the Lord to move heaven and earth to send me abroad and fulfil His bold promise to Florida. As I stay put, He shifts His continent: Atlantic closes, the sheet of time is rent. from Welsh Espionage Welsh was the mother tongue, English was his. He taught her body by fetishist quiz, father and daughter on the bottom stair: "Dy benelin yw elbow, dy wallt yw hair, chin yw dy ên di, head yw dy ben." She promptly forgot, made him do it again. Then he folded her dwrn and, calling it fist, held it to show her knuckles and wrist. "Let's keep it from Mam, as a special surprise. Lips are gwefusau, llygaid are eyes." Each part he touched in their secret game thrilled as she whispered its English name. The mother was livid when she was told. "We agreed, no English till four years old!" She listened upstairs, her head in a whirl Was it such a bad thing to be a Daddy's girl?