If I’d grown up here
I’d have a very loud voice
from outshouting the waterfall,
and maybe I’d attract someone nice
who’d grown up under a flight path,
whose voice rises strong and clear
every thirty minutes or so
(more in the mornings and evenings
and on holiday weekends),
and we could have sonorous offspring
who could boast of their bellowing technique and
could whisper across two cricket fields,
and we’d rarely visit the waterfall
because, to tell the truth,
I think we’d already know
from our rumbustious childhoods
that nothing sounds as good
as quiet feels.