Seegiriye Kurutu Geetha Lassanai

The graffiti verses on the Sigiriya wall are beautiful
I cannot write such beautiful lines, and that hurts me
Across the whole page, all I could write was one line
With my whole heart, I love you

The eighth-day half moon is small, yet it is truly lovely
Even softer than the full moon
That is how beautiful my love is
I cannot find the words for it, I am so helpless

It was you who made me used to my dreams
Now I am afraid to wake from them
I will love that dream forever
Do not be lost to me, it would be a sin

A young man is trying to put his love into words, and he keeps falling short. He thinks of the Sigiriya graffiti, the kurutu gee, those short verses that visitors scratched onto the mirror wall of the ancient rock fortress more than a thousand years ago, many of them written by men awestruck by the painted women on the rock. Those old poets found the language for their wonder. He cannot. He says he sat with a whole page in front of him and managed only a single line: that he loves her with all his heart. That is the quiet joke and the tenderness of the song, that the simplest line is the only true one he has.

When he reaches for an image, he picks the half moon over the full moon, and this is worth slowing down on. In Sinhala song the moon is the usual stand-in for a lovely face, but here he chooses the atawaka sanda, the moon on the eighth day, the half moon. He says it is smaller than the full moon and yet somehow lovelier, gentler on the eyes, kinder. He is telling her that her beauty is not the showy, dazzling kind but a soft and modest one that you can rest your eyes on, and that this is exactly how his love feels too. He cannot fully explain it, and he admits as much, calling himself helpless before a feeling too big for his words.

By the last verse the love has settled into something dreamlike. He says she is the one who got him used to dreaming, and now he is scared to wake up, because waking would mean losing the world she put him in. He decides he would rather stay in the dream and love it forever. The closing line carries real fear under the sweetness: do not be lost to me, he says, that would be a sin. For a Sri Lankan listener, calling a loss a sin, paw, is not a light word. It means losing her would go against something sacred, that the two of them belong together by more than chance. What you are left holding is a humble, almost shy kind of love, a man who knows he is no poet, offering the one plain line he is sure of.