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Underwater Acoustics
Sam Burns
Sound carries better beneath the waves.
We drifted to your side as you choked
on your neck fat; shattered your sleep
with a chorus of stories of drought
and war and hope, and little
brackish footprints on your sheets.
You heard. We thought you were deaf.
It’ll take us a lifetime to tell
you our names. But we’ll do it.
We’ll gurgle them into your waterlogged ears
whenever you swim, when it rains,
when you shower, like air bubbling out
of a poorly-patched lifeboat;
a calving iceberg; like whale song.
Sam Burns, a playwright and poet, was born in Cardiff. She worked for several years as an editor for a small publishing company, and more recently as an assistant to a gardener. Her first full-length play, Not the Worst Place, was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award in 2011. She has also written two novels, one of which, The Story Unmakers, was shortlisted in Susan Hill’s Long Barn Books first novel competition in 2007. She lives in the Shetland Islands.
Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter – wveditor@gmail.com
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