Me Wedikawa Lyrics by Athula Adikari

Let us write a song
Let us sing a song
We long to hear a song
Let us write a song for you
Let us sing a song for you
We long to see your happiness

This stage is our life
Grown as wide as the ocean
This stage is our life
Grown as wide as the ocean

May we live in peace
May we be bound together in love
May we be freed from anger
We want to tell you these hopes
We want to bring you good fortune
We long to wish all this for you

Let us bring peace to the land
Let us hold to kindness with love
We long to bring life to all
May flowers of joy bloom in the heart
May a tender light take shape in the eyes
We long to love the world

This is a singer’s anthem, a song about singing itself and about the wish it carries out into the world. There is no lover here and no heartbreak. The voice belongs to a performer standing in front of a crowd, speaking for everyone who makes and listens to music, and what he keeps reaching for is one simple thing: to write a song, to sing it, and through it to bring people some happiness. Notice how every line is an offering. He doesn’t sing for himself, he sings “for you,” and what he wants in return is just to see the listener glad.

The heart of the song is the line that gives it its name. He calls the stage his life, and says it has grown as wide as the ocean. That image, the stage opening out like the sea, is the whole feeling in one stroke. For a singer who has spent his years up there, the stage isn’t just a wooden platform, it is where his life has happened, and over time it has stopped being small and personal and become as vast and open as the sea, big enough to hold a whole audience, a whole country. Singing has carried him far beyond himself.

From there the wishes widen out the same way the stage does. First they are gentle and human: may we live in peace, may we be tied together by love, may we be free of anger. Then in the last verse they stretch to cover everything. He wants to bring peace to the country, to hold to kindness, to bring life and spirit to all people. The closing images are the tenderest part, flowers of joy blooming in the heart and a soft light forming in the eyes, the old Sinhala way of picturing happiness as something that quietly blossoms and shines out of a person. By the final line the small wish to write a song has become the largest wish of all, simply to love the world.

What stays with you is how a song about songs turns into a kind of blessing. The singer starts by asking for nothing more than to be heard, and ends standing at the edge of his ocean-wide stage, sending peace, kindness and love out toward everyone listening.