Dawasak Daa Lyrics by Rookantha Gunathilaka

One day, in an evening
I thought I’d sit and read a book
But I never thought, just then,
that you would come to mind

The curve of your body traced itself across my skin
You paced back and forth inside my heart
You looked at me and let out a sigh
You loved me, half spoken and half left unsaid
It was written there in the book

Pollen, pollen, a handful of pollen in the flower
They say I’m not allowed to love that flower
They say the golden butterfly wings will never be mine
The flower swaying, brimming with pollen

Was it the moon I saw?
Was it your body I saw?
Was it a painting I saw?
Or was it truly you I saw?

A young man sits down one quiet evening, meaning to lose himself in a book, and instead finds the girl he loves filling his head. That small, ordinary moment is where the whole song lives. He never planned to think of her, but there she is, and the reading is forgotten.

From there the feeling spills over everything around him. He says the shape of her moves across his skin and that she paces back and forth inside his heart, which is his way of saying he cannot hold still or think of anything else. He remembers a look she gave him and a sigh, a love that was partly spoken and partly left hanging in the air, and even the book in front of him seems to have her written in it. This is the ache of early love, when the world rearranges itself around one person.

The middle turn is the tender, painful part. He reaches for an old Sinhala image: the flower heavy with pollen and the golden butterfly that comes to it. In our songs the flower is the beloved and the butterfly is the lover who longs to reach her. When he says they tell him he is not allowed to love that flower, and that the golden wings will never be his, he is admitting she feels out of reach, that something stands between them. The flower keeps swaying, full and beautiful, and he is left watching it from a distance he cannot cross.

The song closes on a soft, dreamlike doubt. He asks whether what he saw was the moon, her body, a painting, or really her. In Sinhala song the moon stands for a calm, glowing beauty, and a painting for something perfect but untouchable, so by piling these up he is saying she felt almost too lovely to be real, more a vision than a person he could hold. What the listener is left with is that gentle confusion of someone so deep in love that he can no longer tell the dream from the one he loves.