Procol Harum - Underture lyrics

Each man has a soul That struggles to escape And in the shallows of his dreams We can often see its wake For we all have our secrets That we all keep deep inside Away from light, in darkest night Where it's always safe to hide Away from all that we should meet Less someone else should share That thing that hides inside our soul That we pray was never there And out upon that ocean A lifetime from the shore Miguel stood his night watch Recalling everything he saw For he was a deckhand Aboard the "maersk dubai" He had sailed her round the world From hamburg to sendai But this trip had been different More than any he had known For on board there was an evil And the evil had been shown For halfway through this voyage They had found two stowaways That the captain had thrown in the sea And left them to the waves And when he tried to close his eyes And pretend he did not know The evil did not go away But used the time to grow For later on that same trip They found a stowaway once again But the captain soon met this one too And brought him to the same cold end He wondered what that boy thought inside Before that final sleep When water was all that was around And his lungs had screamed breathe deep He wondered what went through his mind As he gasped for air And the last moment when he prayed for help To find nobody there He wondered to himself If he could have been the one To stand up at that moment And say this cannot be done To stand up to the captain And say this thing it cannot be But there is nothing closer to god on earth Than a captain on the sea And he was just a deckhand With no right to plead the case Of this stranger in their midst And so he kept his place And what is done is done And undone cannot be And so he pushed it from his mind And stared out across the sea