Rosa Thol Simbimi

I kiss your rose lips, and teardrops rest on them
That is exactly how you taught me love as well
This night and this moon are just like you and me
Like a dream it goes through my heart and it hurts…

The pichcha (jasmine) flowers have opened, and their scent on the bed burns me
The things we said to each other still echo in my ears
The place where you used to be is still so warm in my heart
What I still cannot bear is you going away…

I kiss your rose lips….

The darkness sobs, and with a sigh it puts the stars out
My love, even without you beside me, my heart stays warm
Now and then a teardrop rises and waves at my eyes
I smile, but these warm tears are not mine…

I kiss your rose lips….

A man is alone in the room where he and the woman he loves used to be together, and he keeps replaying the last time he kissed her. Salt on her lips, tears already there while he was kissing her. That is the image the whole song hangs on, and it tells you the parting was already happening in that moment. She is gone now. The song never says where or why, and it does not need to.

The second line does something quietly painful. He says that is exactly how she taught him love, meaning she taught it to him mixed with crying from the start. Then he looks up and says this night and this moon are like the two of them, one dark and one bright, close but never touching. In Sinhala song the moon usually stands for the beloved’s face and for a calm, cooling kind of beauty, so putting her in the sky and himself in the dark below is his way of saying she is still visible to him and completely out of reach.

The middle verse moves into the senses, which is where the grief actually lives. Pichcha, Arabian jasmine, is the small white flower Sri Lankans string for temple offerings, for weddings, and for a woman’s hair, and its scent gets stronger after dark. It should be a sweet smell. Instead it burns him, because it belongs to nights when she was there. The bed still holds her scent, his ears still hold the conversations, the spot where she sat still feels warm to him. Everything in the room has kept her and only he has to live without her.

By the last verse the night itself is grieving with him. The darkness sobs, and its sigh blows the stars out one by one, so even the light overhead goes. Then he turns and says something stubborn and tender, that his heart stays warm even with her far away. A tear comes up and waves at his eye, an odd little phrase that catches how grief arrives, unannounced, almost greeting you like an old visitor. He smiles anyway. And then the closing line, that these warm tears are not his, which is how a man says he is crying her tears now, carrying what she left behind, still refusing to admit whose sorrow this really is.