On the platform of an old railway station I enter a dream And a couple are saying good-bye through the noise and the steam But it's just "Brief Encounter" my mind is trying to rerun And I wait for the poignant finale but the dream has moved on And the train has turned into a ship that is sailing away And the platform is a beach full of shells under silvery grey And the girl on the beach is an English Prime Minister's daughter And she watches the ship disappear at the edge of the water And it feels like the pain in her heart will be never-ending And everyone feels this way in the beginning And she watches the ship disappear for the length of a sigh And the maker of rhymes onthe deck who is going to die In the corner of some foreign field that will make him so famous As a light temporarily shines to illumine his pages Then the scene has changed once again; now it's moonlight on wire And the night is disturbed by a sudden volcano of fire And a skull in a trench gazes up open-mouthed at the moon
And the poets are now Wilfred own and Siegfried Sa**oon And nobody talks anymore about losing and winning And everyone feels that way in the beginning And I'm up in the air looking down at a girl on a bed She's lying asleep on her side with a boook at her head And it's someone who left long ago Was it something I said? And I hope that she's reading "King Lear", but it's "Twelfth Night" instead. Now the girl and the beach and the train and the ship are all gone And the calendar up on the wall says it's ninety years on I go out into the yard where the newspaper waits There's a man on the cover we all know, defying the fates And he seems very sure ashe offers up his opinion Well everyone feels like this in the beginning When you feel that the pain in your heart will be unending Everyone feels this way in the beginning If you feel that the pain in your heart will be never-ending Well everyone feels that way in the beginning