Sanwedana Lyrics by Shane Zing

Feelings, I carry a heavy weight in my heart, awake the whole night without sleep
Loving thoughts caught fire and burned away
Because you left me with the fire of sorrow
Even that, even that, all blurred together
I sang my songs of grief

The sky split in two, they say the moon sank into the heavens
My eyes can no longer see, because I always need your face
Oh, oh
Even in the valleys of saṃsāra (the cycle of rebirth), the one I will meet is always you
Waiting for that moment to draw near, I am still not gone

Even the river has run dry
I breathed out, and with that breath the land turned to dust
Even the waves drawn up from the sea
In that vast water, not knowing, I fell silent
Sand on the shore, left all alone, like this
That day, I thought only of you

A young man lies awake through the whole night, unable to sleep, because the girl he loved has gone and left him alone with his grief. That is where the song opens, with the word “sanwedana,” feelings, the kind of raw emotion that floods you when a love ends. He says the loving thoughts he once held have caught fire and burned away, and that the only thing she left behind is the fire of sorrow. So he does the one thing he can: he sits and sings his sad songs into the empty night.

From there the heartbreak grows until it swallows the whole world around him. He says the sky has split in two and the moon has sunk and drowned in it. In Sinhala song the moon usually stands for the beloved’s calm, lovely face, so a moon that drowns is her beauty lost to him, gone under, no longer there to look up at. His eyes, he says, can no longer see anything, because they only ever wanted to see her. Then comes the line that holds the deepest ache of all. He reaches for saṃsāra, the Buddhist cycle of birth and rebirth that runs through so much Sri Lankan love poetry, and swears that even across all those lives, in every valley of that endless wandering, the one he will meet again is her. He is barely holding on, waiting for that moment, saying he is still not gone.

In the last verse the grief turns the landscape itself dead and dry. The river has run out of water, and even his own breath leaves the earth parched. He pictures the great ocean and its waves, but in all that water he stands mute, drowning in a different way, in feeling rather than sea. The closing image is the loneliest one: he is a grain of sand left on an empty shore, and all he did that day was think of her. What you are left holding is a young man whose whole world, sky and moon and river and sea, has gone barren because one person walked away, and who would still choose her across every life to come.