The Jolly Little Cafe Where a Chestnut Tree Once Grew - Monologue
There's a jolly little cafe where a chestnut tree once grew,
They serve hot bubbling tea and buttered toast,
Where the waiter wears a waistcoat which is buttoned up askew
And the waitress glides along much like a ghost.
The chestnut in the glade has now fallen to the blade
Many years have passed since lovers neath it met
And there below its shade, fickle promises were made,
But promises are easy to forget.
For there, or so they say, on one January day
A maiden took her life beneath the tree
And lifeless, then, she lay, the maid who lost her way,
Who pleaded for her spirit to be free.
Yet, the glade remembers well, when the dusk appears anew,
And the customers have all gone home to bed
And the jolly little cafe where a chestnut tree once grew
Conceals the secret of the forlorn dead.
Where, in the winter snow she was jilted by her beau
Beside the latent chestnut over there
And twenty years ago, when the northern wind would blow
The sorrow must have been too much to bear.
So, the waitress, serving on, in the cafe called 'The Swan'
Never, ever speaks or smiles or lifts her eyes
And when the day is gone then, almost everyone
Imagines and their minds romanticise.
They think of teenage lovers hand in hand and in the spring
Where bounty of the blazing brightness brims
And think of summer swallows and all the song they bring,
Of trueloves meeting neath the chestnut limbs.
The waiter, by the door, paces proudly round the floor
Taking orders from the ladies who call by
And some twenty years or more he has been this way before
Where he deserted a poor maiden young and shy.
Though, if you ask 'Excuse me sir, the waitress, what of her?'
When the cafe waiter passes near
He'll peer at you with a stir and answer, as it were,
'We've had no waitress ever working here'.
There's a jolly little cafe where a chestnut tree once grew
They serve hot bubbling tea and buttered toast
Where the waiter wears a waistcoat which is buttoned up askew
And the waitress glides along much like a ghost
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