Hithawanthi Lyrics by Dhyan Hewage

Brushing against the surface of the mind, coming near
the field of flowers drifted away and was gone
did that beauty blur in sorrow?
did those bees of love grow drunk?

In the range of blue eyes, lips that smiled
teardrops in the eyes, drawing her face all over

Burning the dreaming heart,
searching for love beside me,
you whom I once called, back then, my dear one
you who watch the road, yet never come again,
lover drawn across the sky, for company

Close, in an innocent childlike dream,
to lie down softly, in secret,
to find comfort once again,
tell me, are you still there?

In the range of blue eyes, lips that smiled
teardrops in the eyes, drawing her face all over

Burning the dreaming heart,
searching for love beside me,
you whom I once called, back then, my dear one
you who watch the road, yet never come again,
lover drawn across the sky, for company

Still that moon is unbroken,
I keep the watch alone, close beside
through the three watches of night I forgo sleep, with you

In the range of blue eyes, lips that smiled
teardrops in the eyes, drawing her face all over

Burning the dreaming heart,
searching for love beside me,
you whom I once called, back then, my dear one
you who watch the road, yet never come again,
lover drawn across the sky, for company

This is a song of longing for a love that is gone but not forgotten, addressed to a woman the singer once tenderly called hithawanthi, “dear one.” The whole piece hovers in the space between memory and hope. Something “brushes against the surface of the mind,” and with it “the field of flowers drifted away,” an image of a beautiful shared time already slipping into the past. He wonders whether that beauty “blurred in sorrow,” whether the “bees of love grew drunk,” questioning what became of the sweetness they had.

Her face is drawn again and again in his mind, “blue eyes, lips that smiled,” but always now through “teardrops in the eyes.” The central ache is captured in one line: “you who watch the road, yet never come again.” She is a “lover drawn across the sky,” painted into the heavens for company because she can no longer be here beside him, a presence made only of memory and imagination.

The most moving turn is his faithful vigil. “Still that moon is unbroken,” he says, and “I keep the watch alone,” forgoing sleep “through the three watches of night,” the whole night long, as if she were still with him. His only question, asked twice like a prayer, is the simplest and saddest one: “tell me, are you still there?” What the listener is left with is the quiet devotion of someone who cannot let go, keeping a lonely night-watch for a beloved who waits on some far road and never returns.