Samawela Hadaganna Mata Mage Sitha Lyrics by Chamara Weerasinghe

Forgive me, ah… let me make peace with my own heart
Just once, let me bow at your feet
Let me bow down…
There is no stain on my heart, that’s the truth, see
So don’t pass me by on the road and walk away

Forgive me… let me make peace with my own heart

I went far away, turning my back on your heart
Not knowing my own face was wet with tears
Was it a love you never received that you went looking for in your heart
Even when I came, the saffron robe had turned against me

When you walk away in that saffron robe, the road grows still
There’s no hiding place for love left in any corner of the heart
To pay off the sins I have done, let me be forgiven
Just once, let me bow at your feet

A man stands before the woman he loved as she walks away from him for good, and all he asks is one thing. Let me bow at your feet, just once, and let my heart finally be at peace. That plea, “samawela hadaganna mata mage hitha,” to forgive and settle his own heart, is where the whole song lives. He isn’t trying to win her back. He’s trying to make peace with himself before she is gone.

What gives the song its weight is where she is going. The saffron robe, the kasawatha, is the ochre robe of a Buddhist nun or monk, and when he sings of her leaving “in that saffron robe,” he is telling us she has renounced worldly life and taken to the spiritual path. That is why he asks to “bow at her feet,” wandinna, the word used for paying respect to the ordained. The woman he once loved as an equal is now someone he must revere, and the love between them has nowhere left to go. “There’s no hiding place for love left in any corner of the heart,” he says, because once she puts on that robe, the old feelings have no place to live.

The middle verse is his confession. He admits he turned his back on her and walked away, and only later, with tears he didn’t even notice on his own face, did he understand what he had done. He wonders if it was a love she never got from him that sent her searching, that finally drove her to give up the world altogether. By the time he came back, it was too late. The robe had already come between them.

What he is left holding is not anger but guilt and a quiet ache. He calls his own failings “paw,” sins, and asks only to atone by bowing at her feet one last time. There is no bitterness here, just a man watching someone he loved disappear into a life he cannot follow, hoping that one small act of respect might let him forgive himself for how it ended.