Amma Jeewana Uyan There Lyrics by Chandrasena Hettiarachchi

Mother, in the garden of life
you bring me comfort and peace
Mother, in the garden of life
a lamp that burns on and never goes out
you bring me comfort and peace

Not with cool moonlight but with my own blood, when I give you to drink
let me feed this priceless love to my son
In a son’s world where love has drained away and dried up
mother, soften it again with your milk

Born in tears, dying in tears
on the stage of life, may you become a precious life
In the ownerless waters of the river of life
take me into your arms and let me rest there forever

This is a song to a mother, and to motherhood itself. The voice calls her “the garden of life,” the one place where a child first feels safe, and tells her plainly what she gives: comfort, peace, and a steady light. The image of the lamp that burns on and never goes out is the heart of it. In Sinhala devotion a lamp stands for something sacred that you keep alight no matter what, and here a mother’s love is exactly that, a flame that simply does not die down.

The middle verse turns to sacrifice, and it is meant to startle a little. She says she will not feed her child with cool moonlight but with her own blood. Moonlight in Sinhala song is the gentle, easy kind of beauty and tenderness, and the line sets it aside on purpose: real mothering is not the soft, pretty version, it costs the body, it costs the self. A mother gives her own life into her child the way she once gave milk. And when the wider world has gone hard, when love has drained out of it and dried up, the song asks the mother to wet it back to life with her milk, as if a mother’s care is the one thing that can keep a heart from turning to dust.

The last verse widens out to the whole shape of a life. We are born in tears and we leave in tears, and in between we play our part on the stage of the world, hoping to become something of worth, “a precious life.” The river of life carries everyone along with no owner and no shore to hold on to. So the final wish is the simplest and the deepest one a child can make: take me into your arms, and let me rest there for good. After all the talk of blood and sacrifice, the song ends in the safest place it knows, a mother’s embrace, the one harbor in a life with no fixed banks.