Sewwandiyakata Pembenda

Having lost my heart to a sewwandi flower (the thorned China rose)
I tasted a thousand longings
But the thorn at the tip of the stem turns bitter
And my heart is left wounded and aching

In the love-garden of a young heart
a thousand flowers smile at me

There is something I myself cannot understand
my heart goes only to the sewwandi flower

Her beauty is there before my eyes
her fragrance drifts close to me

And yet poison rose on the tip of that thorn
and the sewwandi flower wounds my heart

A young man has fallen for a girl, and he tells the whole story through one image, a sewwandi flower. The sewwandi is the China rose, a bloom every Sri Lankan knows: lovely to look at, sweet to the senses, but growing on a stem lined with thorns. He has given his heart to this flower, drunk in a thousand hopes from it, and now he is finding out that the same stem that holds the bloom can also draw blood. The beauty and the hurt come from the very same place.

The song moves through that ache. In the love-garden of his young heart, a thousand flowers smile at him, meaning plenty of girls, plenty of choices, plenty of beauty around. But he cannot explain even to himself why his heart fixes on this one sewwandi and no other. He sees her beauty plainly, her fragrance reaches him, everything about her draws him in. Then, in the same breath, poison gathers at the tip of the thorn and the flower he loves is the thing that cuts him.

That is the heart of it. In Sinhala song the flower stands for the beloved and her beauty, while the thorn (katu) and the poison (wisa) stand for the pain that loving her brings. He is not blaming her so much as admitting an old truth about love, that the more beautiful the flower, the sharper the thorn, and that you cannot reach for the one without risking the other. He has reached anyway, eyes open, and now he carries both the sweetness he tasted and the wound it left.