Ruwak Adenawa

A figure takes shape, someone is coming
The honey-wine veil closes over my eyes
The form bound up in my heart melts and flows
Into your world I come, in a moment

At the start of the flower path of sweet youth, sitting there
Why do you wet your lips with honey-wine? //
It is to put out the fires of love and longing
That I am wetting both my lips from the wine

A figure takes shape… //

The risen fires of love fall like sparks of rain
And from all four sides they come sprouting up //
Leaving the honey-wine alone at the tavern
Come, my flower, taking your steps to me

A figure takes shape… //

A young man is calling out to the woman he loves, and as he does her shape seems to rise up in front of him, a form taking shape out of his own longing. That is what “a figure takes shape, someone is coming” means, she is not really there yet, but his mind draws her up so vividly that he can almost see her step toward him.

The whole song runs on the image of meewita, honey-wine. In Sinhala love poetry wine stands for the sweet, heady rush of being in love, the kind of feeling that blurs your senses the way drink does. So when he says the honey-wine veil closes over his eyes, he means the sweetness of loving her has clouded everything else from view. The form held close in his heart “melts and flows,” the way longing dissolves a person until they feel they are pouring themselves into the one they love.

In the middle verse the two voices meet. He asks her why she sits at the edge of the flower path of youth wetting her lips with wine, and she answers that she drinks only to cool the burning of love and separation. The “fires of love and longing” are the ache of wanting someone you are kept apart from, and the wine, the sweetness of the love itself, is the one thing that soothes that burn. They are using the same image back and forth, his and hers, both turning to the same sweetness for relief.

By the last verse those fires have grown. The sparks fall like rain and “sprout up from all four sides,” longing springing up everywhere he turns, impossible to hold back. So he makes his plea: leave the wine sitting in the tavern and come to me yourself. He has been drinking the idea of her, the imagined sweetness, and now he wants the real woman to set down all of that and simply walk to him. Calling her “my flower” is the soft, tender name a Sri Lankan lover gives, and the song ends on that open hand, asking her to take the steps that close the distance between them.