JUDI Benson offers a lively cameo of her local swimming pool and its denizens, before an unexpected reflection.
Her poem comes from her collection Hole in the Wall (Rockingham Press, £9.99). A Californian, based in London's East End, she spent three years as writer in residence at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary.
LEISURE
Today I will go swim,
not round and round in goldfish fashion
but up and down in orderly lanes
amongst the splashers, the flailers, the guppies,
and the one who causes a tidal wave trying to do the Butterfly.
It's good for me I say
and then think with dismay how I leisure myself
using more water than some villages have in a year.
Each drop I spit out is someone's lifeline.
If we could just tip the earth
the way one tips a pitcher,
fill the empty from the too full.
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