Wahi Kawiya

Heart-aching …
heart-breaking …
amid my cruel …
words …
forever …
staying close …
my very own moonstone …

That enchants the whole world …
amid sweet flowers and foul odours …
felt all through my chest …
you are the scent of rain …

Among poet-bees …
who write in many colours …
knowing no metre of verse …
you are my very own rain-poem …

Heart-aching …
heart-breaking …
amid my cruel …
words …
forever …
staying close …
my very own moonstone …

This is a quiet love poem in which the singer keeps reaching for the most cherished images in Sri Lankan life to describe the one he loves. Even amid his own harsh words, he says, she stays close forever, and he calls her his sandakadapahana, the carved moonstone step at the entrance of an old temple. To a Sinhala listener that is high praise: the moonstone is a thing of serene, sacred beauty that welcomes you at the threshold, so she is the calm, holy presence at the doorway of his heart.

Then he turns to rain. In a world full of scents both sweet and foul, the one that fills his chest, he says, is the wahi suwanda, the smell of the first rain on dry earth. Every Sri Lankan knows that scent and the relief it brings after long heat, so to call her the scent of rain is to call her the very thing he waits for and breathes in with his whole body.

He closes on poetry itself. Among the poet-bees who write in many colours he admits he knows no metre and no rules of verse, and yet she is his own rain-poem. It is his way of saying that love made a poet of him though he never learned how, and that she is the simplest and most beautiful thing he could ever write.