Sansara Sihinaye Lyrics by Chamika Sirimanna

In the dream of saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth), you are the angel I love
All through this spring, my heart loves you
I love you
You are my love

Like a na flower, filled with tender thoughts of you
I come carrying you in love, and fold you into my arms
You are like the moonlight, cradled in the blue sky
Endless, boundless joy spilled across my eyes

In the dream of saṃsāra …..

The wishes I longed for from you, you brought me in love
A bed of roses, dream stars in its heart
With a little mischief filling this bridegroom’s heart
You whisper that you love to stay right here beside me

In the dream of saṃsāra …..

A young man is so in love that he reaches past this one lifetime to describe it. He calls the girl he loves the angel of his dreams across saṃsāra, the long cycle of births and rebirths that runs through Sri Lankan thought, as if to say she is not just the love of this season but the one he has been waiting for through countless lives. The whole song is him speaking straight to her, soft and sure, in that early glow of love where everything feels settled and right.

The images he reaches for are all gentle ones. He compares his heart to a na flower (the bloom of the ironwood tree, the na, that is sacred and prized here), full of tender feeling, and then he simply gathers her up and holds her close. When he calls her moonlight cradled in a blue sky, he is using the picture Sinhala song loves best, the moon, for a calm, cooling beauty that soothes rather than dazzles. She is the soft light in his sky, and looking at her fills his eyes with a joy he says has no end.

By the last verse the dream turns homely and warm. Everything he ever wished for, she has brought to him. He pictures a bed of roses scattered with stars, and there is a playful, mischievous happiness running through what he calls his bridegroom’s heart, the giddy feeling of a man imagining his life with her. The song closes on the simplest wish of all, that she wants to stay right beside him. What stays with you is how lightly it carries something this big: a love he frames as old as rebirth itself, told in the plain words of someone who just wants the person he loves to never leave.