The Uneeda Rest
© James Gordon
from Pipe Street Dreams on Pipe Street Records
See this old postcard, it's from 1938,
That's a picture of a steamer
Out in Sparrow Lake.
That's his writing on the back,
It just says "All the best"-
See you next summer, at the Uneeda Rest
Remember when September simply didn't exist,
And summer was as endless as that first real kiss,
That night behind the boathouse, when I said to him "not yet"-
Is a moment I've had more than sixty years to regret.
But there seemed to be no hurry, Whoever would have guessed,
That summer was our last at the Uneeda Rest
Here's the hat I wore when we met at the Port Stanton Dock,
I was playing with it nervously on our first moonlit walk,
Once he teased me, saying that it didn't match my dress,
then he threw it from the verandah of the Uneeda Rest.
Waltzing across the lawn,
Lantern reflections on water,
Photographs frozen in Three-Quarter time.
I cried all that winter, told my mother how I missed him,
More tears in the spring when I learned he'd enlisted,
I returned to that hotel, but it meant a little less,
My summer was over, at the Uneeda Rest
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