Owen Sheers - The Wake lyrics

He looks me straight in the eye, ninety years old folded in his favourite chair, and tells me he doesn't want this, to watch himself die, to have the doctor plumb any further depth of his scarred lungs. He, who himself spent so many years holding the chests of others up to the light to forecast the storms gathering there, the squalls and depressions smudging those two pale oceans, rising and falling in the rib cage's hull. Here then is the old curse of too much knowledge, driftwood collected along the shore of a century. He settles himself in the chair and I say what I can, but my words are spoken into a coastal wind long after the ship has sailed. Later he shows me to the door and as he stands in its frame to wave me away we both know there has already been a pa**ing, one that has left a wake as that of a great ship that disturbs the sea for miles either side but leaves the water directly at its stern strangely settled, turned, fresh and somehow new, like the first sea there ever was or that ever will be.