Dileepa Podi Puthu Lyrics by Clarence Wijewardena

Dileepa, little son, sleep peacefully
on your mother’s lap, your cradle
My prince, the crown that is mine
on the royal throne of my life

In your delicate, soft little hands,
tender as a dove’s two feet,
your tiny closed fists hold hidden away
the songs I never wrote

Dileepa, little son….

In the palace of my heart where I have kept my blood,
there was a single drop missing
Hiding that away and coming in the guise of an infant,
that treasure is you, my son

Dileepa, little son, sleep peacefully
on your mother’s lap, your cradle
(My prince, the crown that is mine
on the royal throne of my life…//)

This is a lullaby, a mother singing her baby boy to sleep. She calls him by name, Dileepa, and rocks him on her lap, which she turns into the only cradle he needs. Karunarathna Abeysekara wrote it, and the words have the gentle, elevated grace that runs through his best work, a mother’s whole heart poured over a sleeping child.

The first thing she does is crown him. He is her prince, her “kirula” (the royal crown), and her life is the throne he sits on. In Sinhala this is the highest tenderness a parent can reach for, the child is not just loved, he is royalty, and the mother gladly makes herself the throne that holds him up. To her, this small sleeping boy is the most precious thing she will ever rule over.

Then she looks at his hands. She compares them to the soft little feet of a “parevi” (a dove), an image Sri Lankan listeners know at once as something pure, gentle and fragile, the kind of softness you are almost afraid to touch. Inside those tiny closed fists, she imagines, are all the songs she herself never managed to write. It is a beautiful turn, she sees her child as the poem her own life left unfinished, the music she carried but never got to sing, now resting safe in his hands.

The last verse is the most moving. She pictures her heart as a palace where she has stored away her own blood, and says one drop of it had always been missing. That missing drop, she sings, hid itself and came back to her wearing the form of a baby. So her son is not a stranger who arrived, he is a piece of her own being that was lost and has finally come home. By the end you understand the whole song is one feeling held very still, a mother watching her child sleep and quietly telling him he is her crown, her unwritten song, and the last missing part of herself made whole.