Minisa Suwandai Malase Lyrics by Sunil Edirisinghe

Man is fragrant, like a flower,
with eyes as bright as the sun.
The dove has fallen,
that sun-flower has wilted on this earth.

Crying out, “this land is mine,”
the gentle goodness of the innocent is shamed.
In wars where they die by the thousands,
each one hunting for his own claim,
drowning the world in tears of sorrow,
asking love to grant them victory.

Warm blood turns to poison in the body
in the space between two heartbeats.
Flowers of fire bloom across the sky,
a sea of flame and burning oil.
Sinking down with a single breath,
with a sigh I send up my prayer.

This is a peace song, a quiet lament for what people do to one another. It opens with an image of how beautiful a human being really is. A person is fragrant like a flower, with eyes as bright as sunlight. In Sinhala writing the flower and its scent stand for the gentleness and goodness a person is born with, and the sun in the eyes stands for the light of life and intelligence. So the song begins by reminding us what we are at our best, soft, bright, alive.

Then it turns to what we have done to that beauty. The dove, the world’s plainest symbol of peace, has fallen to the ground, and the “sun-flower,” that bright and fragrant human being from the first verse, has wilted on the earth. The middle of the song names why. People cry out “this land is mine,” and in that single greedy claim the innocent are shamed and the gentle are destroyed. Thousands die in wars, each side chasing its own piece of ownership, and the whole world is drowned in tears. The bitter line is that they ask love itself to hand them victory, as if killing could ever be blessed.

The closing verse is where the imagery turns terrible and exact. Warm blood, the very thing that keeps us alive, turns to poison inside the body in the space of a single heartbeat, the moment a person is struck down. “Flowers of fire bloom across the sky” is the song’s most haunting picture: explosions and bombs blossoming overhead like grotesque flowers, beauty turned into horror. The sea itself burns with fire and oil. After all this, the voice has no answer left, only grief. It sinks down with one last breath and, with a sigh, sends up a prayer.

What the listener is left holding is that final, helpless prayer. The song does not preach or shout. It simply lays the beauty of a human life beside the ugliness of war and lets you feel the distance between them. By the end there is nothing to do but mourn and ask, quietly, for it to stop.