The gym poem

I've mentioned before, probably several times, that I go to a gym regularly. The habit started probably some time in the 1980s, when I was working as Librarian at the British Geological Survey, then based on the University of Edinburgh's science campus. There was a gym there, we were entitled to use it, and I did, often in lieu of lunch.

When I moved to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 1988 I missed it, but for a time I was allowed to use the University's facilities at The Pleasance. Then the rules changed, and I couldn't use it, so I sometimes went to a private gym, but most often I used the gym at the Commonwealth Pool. Then I got too busy, and didn't go regularly, until after we moved to Dunbar in 2000. There's a gym here, in the Leisure Pool building, and after I retired in 2002 I was eligible for reduced rates. For a very small monthly payment, I have unlimited off-peak access to the gym, the health suite and the pool. I try to go three times a week, and I'm convinced of the health benefits. But it's also a social thing. I have friends who go there regularly, and we find the time to chat between struggling with the treadmill, the cross-trainer, the resistance machines and the dumb-bells.

So it maybe won't come as a surprise that from time to time I'm challenged to write a poem about the gym, and once or twice, I have. This one was first published in the New Voices Press anthology, Working Words (2008), and is included in my 2012 collection, The propriety of weeding, available from Red Squirrel Press.

Working Mothers

Monday morning, kids crêched,
time to hit the gym
for a weekly workout.

Time to catch
the latest chat,
as you run for dear life

facing the mirror
of yesterday’s extra helping,
seeing tomorrow’s toned

and youthful body;
squeezing out the weekend’s toxins,
working up a sweat,

a schedule to tuck and tighten,
to firm and reform your figure,
recover your before-baby body.

Row, run, step, push,
the cycle of exercise freewheels
to the sounds of rap and chatter.

Meanwhile, in the corner,
a puffing Gran tries to reset
her own odometer

to ten years back,
hoping for twenty more,
betrayed by connective tissue

which snaps when it used
to stretch, by ballooning veins
and the hourglass streaming faster.



Copyright © Colin Will 2008, 2012