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 shall 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 the 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.