Sinhala Sindu Kiyana Lyrics by Gunadasa Kapuge

You who sing Sinhala songs,
little bird with a tilaka on your brow,
carrying a heart in your beak,
did you fly into the burning palmyra grove?

Speaking love poems in a tongue not your own,
falling under the spell of a bird,
a bouquet made of fire-flowers
the bride took into her hand.
Among the sweet thorns of the honeymoon
the lovely one bloomed and then withered.

Bound in love together with the guns,
the flock of birds will weep.
To lift those tears into Sinhala
you have it in you, my love.
Love is placed in your keeping,
guard it well, goddess.

This is an elegy in the shape of a love song, written for a young woman caught on the wrong side of a war. The voice speaks to her tenderly, calling her a “kirilli,” a little bird, the gentlest word in Sinhala for a sweet girl. She wears a tilaka on her forehead and she sings in Sinhala, though, as the song quietly tells us, Sinhala is not her own tongue. She is a Tamil girl who learned the language of the people across the divide so she could speak the love poems of the boy she fell for.

The “burning palmyra grove” is the heart of the song, and it is where a non Sri Lankan reader needs help. The palmyra (thal) is the tree of the North, of Jaffna and the Tamil country, and during the war that land was set on fire. So when the singer asks whether she flew, heart in her beak, into a grove already in flames, he is asking how she walked straight into a love and a country that were burning. The wedding she steps into is darker still: the bouquet she takes as a bride is “made of fire-flowers,” blossoms shaped from gunfire. Marriage and war are folded into the same image, and the line that follows says everything plainly, she bloomed and then withered among the sweet thorns of her own honeymoon. Joy and ruin arrived together.

The last verse widens out from the two lovers to everyone the war touched. The birds, the ordinary people, were “bound in love together with the guns,” and now the whole flock weeps. The singer asks this one girl to do something only she can do: take all of that grief, the tears of people who loved across a border of blood, and lift them up into Sinhala, into song, into a voice the other side can finally hear. It is a plea for her to be the bridge that the fighting refused to be.

By the close he is no longer calling her a little bird but a goddess, “dewathawi,” and handing her something sacred. Love is placed in your keeping, he says, guard it well. After all the fire and the withering, the song does not end in despair. It ends by trusting a grieving young woman to carry love safely through a war that everything else has failed.