Mee Pirunu Suwanda Lyrics by Anjalin GunathilakaHR Jothipala

(Male)
In this flower grove full of honeyed scent
Love appears, smiling
Wishes are born, and in the guise of birds
They fly off into the endless sky

(Female)
On the day this young heart wakes with the rising tide
Life now gives its meaning to me
Feelings stir awake, my lips murmuring soft words
And my fluttering eyelashes speak for me

(Male)
Even in a dream I could not have imagined it,
To be given a sapphire, my hands filled with dark riches

(Female)
I ask for no palace, I seek no riches
I will lie down and rest on the ground of your heart

(Male)
With my eyes closed and my heart full of joy
Sleep comes to me, sweet and untroubled

(Female)
Touched with water lilies, mingled with sandalwood,
The fragrance flows and scatters on the breeze

(Male)
In some place long ago, bound to one another one day,
The way we once were, I remember it and weep

(Female)
That day was just like this, and this day is the same
The lamp of love keeps shining, from one life to the next

This one goes back and forth between a man and a woman, two lovers answering each other, each putting into words what the other’s love has done to them. It plays out like a quiet conversation between two people who have found each other and can hardly believe their luck.

He opens in a grove heavy with sweet scent, and tells her that love itself has come to him smiling. His wishes, he says, are born as birds and fly off into the endless sky, which is his way of saying that being loved by her has set something free in him, that his hopes no longer feel small or earthbound. She answers that her young heart has woken like a tide coming in, and that only now does her life have any meaning. She is so full of feeling she can barely speak, so her trembling lips and fluttering eyelashes do the talking for her. Anyone who has been struck speechless by new love will know exactly that moment.

The imagery here is worth slowing down for, because it carries the weight of the song. When he says he has been handed a sapphire (indunila, the deep blue gem) and his hands are full of dark riches, he means her, she is the treasure he never dared dream of. She answers that beautifully, she does not want a palace or wealth, she only wants to lie down and rest on the ground of his heart. In Sinhala love poetry the beloved’s heart becomes a place, a piece of land you can finally rest on, and that is the deepest promise she can make. Then she reaches for sandalwood (sandun) and water lilies, scents tied to temple offerings and to purity, and says their love drifts on the breeze like that fragrance, gentle, sacred, impossible to hold but everywhere at once.

By the end the song turns from this life to many. He remembers being bound to her in some place long ago and weeps at the memory, and she closes by saying that day was like this and this day is the same, the lamp of love burning on bhawen bhawe, from one birth to the next. That phrase carries the Buddhist idea of saṃsāra, the long chain of rebirths, and it lifts a simple love duet into something larger, a vow that this is not new and will not end with this lifetime. What the listener is left holding is that rare, settled feeling of a love that seems older than the people feeling it, sweet enough to sleep peacefully on, and steady enough to outlast death itself.