Pura Poya Handata Lyrics by Sunil Edirisinghe

Maidens like stars, bound in love to the full-moon Poya glow,
Come and listen to the love story this song tells.
O blue sky… ee… ee…
Come and listen to her love story…

The day a string of pearls is tied around the neck…
The day the mind reads the soft green thoughts rising in it…
The day sleep won’t come at night and dreams are seen instead…
Has the heart, I wonder, been bound in love…

The day golden festoons are tied to decorate the road…
The day the heart’s little drum plays its rolling beat…
The day kin and friends fill the place with smiles…
Has the heart, I wonder, been bound in love…

This is a tender, literary love song, the kind Sunil Edirisinghe is loved for, and it works less like a confession and more like a gentle invitation. The voice calls out to the night sky and to the stars themselves, picturing them as maidens, and asks you to come and sit and listen to a love story carried in the music. From the very first line it sets a soft, moonlit mood rather than rushing into raw feeling.

The imagery here is worth slowing down for, because it is all drawn from a Sinhala world a non-Sri-Lankan reader would miss. “Pura poya” is the full-moon night of the lunar month, the Poya, which carries a calm, almost sacred glow in Sri Lankan life. Setting the love story under that light gives it a quiet, blessed feeling, not a feverish one. The stars are imagined as young women bound by love, so the whole sky becomes a gathering of lovers, and the song you are about to hear belongs to one of them.

Each verse then asks the same quiet question through small, telling signs. A string of pearls tied around the neck, golden festoons strung across the road, the soft beating of a little hand-drum, family and friends crowding in with smiles, these are all the marks of a wedding, the decorated lane and the music of celebration. Woven among them are the private signs of falling for someone, the green shoots of new thoughts stirring in the mind, the sleepless nights when dreams come instead of rest. The “soft green thoughts” use green the way Sinhala poetry often does, for something tender and freshly sprouting, like new leaves, here the first growth of love in the heart.

After each set of signs comes the same gentle refrain, “has the heart been bound in love, I wonder.” That little hesitation is the warmth of the whole song. The singer already sees every sign of a heart that has fallen, the celebration, the sleeplessness, the smiles, yet still asks softly, as if love is something too quiet and too precious to declare outright. You are left with the feeling of a wedding night under a full moon, and a heart that knows the answer but loves to keep asking.