Sanda midulata enawa Lyrics by Mervin Perera

The moon comes into the yard
and her face comes back to me.
The moon, rocked and settled to sleep on the water,
she slips away and hides in the light of the night.
She slips away and hides in the light of the night.

She lives inside the moonbeam,
and I live on in my own world.
She lives inside the moonbeam,
and I live on in my own world.
She will drift far away, the night will turn cold,
leaving me here, all alone.
Leaving me here, all alone.

The moon comes into the yard…

Rise again the way you did,
be enough to carry me through the life ahead.
Rise again the way you did,
be enough to carry me through the life ahead.
The stars of the night will rise, and those stars will shine
just the way she came, with a glance from her eyes.
Just the way she came, with a glance from her eyes.

The moon comes into the yard…

A young man stands in his yard at night, and the moon climbing into view brings back the face of a woman he has lost. That is where the whole song lives, in that quiet moment when moonlight and memory blur into one another. He is not telling a story so much as sitting with a feeling, the ache of someone who has gone and left only her image behind.

The moon does almost all the work here. When he says she lives “inside the moonbeam,” he means she has become as far off and untouchable as the moon itself, something he can see and long for but never reach. The lovely line about the moon being “rocked and settled to sleep on the water” is the reflection of the moon trembling on a pond or a paddy field, and as that reflection shivers and breaks up, so she too slips away and “hides in the light of the night.” She is everywhere in the glow around him and nowhere he can hold. He is left standing in his own ordinary world while she belongs to the sky.

In the last verse the longing turns into a soft prayer. He asks her, or the memory of her, to “rise again the way you did,” like the moon rising, and to be enough to see him through the rest of his life. He looks up at the stars coming out and sees in their shine the same thing he first saw in her, that one glance she gave him with her eyes. It is a small, tender detail, and it tells you the whole love began with a single look.

What stays with you is the loneliness wrapped in something beautiful. He is not bitter that she is gone. He has turned her into moonlight and starlight, into the night sky itself, so that every clear evening she comes back to him for a moment before fading again. For anyone who has loved someone now out of reach, that is a familiar kind of comfort and a familiar kind of pain.