Numbe Neth Tharu

The verses I once wrote,
comparing your eyes to stars,
those very verses, today,
come to question me:
if your two eyes are stars,
then why do they burn me like fire?…//

The verses I once wrote,
comparing your face to a flower,
those very verses, today,//
come to question me:
if your face is a flower,
then why does it prick me like a thorn?

The verses I once wrote,
comparing your eyes to stars,
those very verses, today,
come to question me:
if your two eyes are stars,
then why do they burn me like fire?

The verses I once wrote,
having found your heart to be tender,
those very verses, today,//
come to question me:
if your heart is tender,
then why, when it strikes the head, does it hurt?

The verses I once wrote,
comparing your eyes to stars,
those very verses, today,
come to question me:
if your two eyes are stars,
then why do they burn me like fire?

A clever, aching classic in which a poet’s own love-poems turn back on him and become his accusers. Long ago, he says, he wrote verses comparing your eyes to stars; and now those very verses come to question me. The question is the whole song’s wound: if your two eyes are stars, then why do they burn me like fire? The praise he once wrote has become the measure of his pain.

The same device repeats with fresh images. He once likened her face to a flower, so the poem asks: if your face is a flower, then why does it prick me like a thorn? Every tender comparison he made in love has been turned inside out by heartbreak, beauty into burning, flower into thorn.

And once more with her heart. He had found your heart to be tender, and wrote it so; now the verse demands, if your heart is tender, then why, when it strikes, does it hurt? Sung by Lakshman Wijesekara to words by Yasanath Dhammika Bandara, composed by Dr. Rohana Weerasinghe, it is a beautifully constructed classic about a lover cross-examined by his own old love-poems, each sweet metaphor turned into proof of how much the same love now wounds him.