Hemin Sere Piya Wida Lyrics by T.M. Jayarathne

Step softly, gently in

On the smooth, soft bedding of a tender bed
Dreams have come, like a flock of birds settling
On the soft bedding of a tender, sweet bed

Ah…… //

If she is a flower, what a flower she is
Soft and delicate,
adorned with beauty
If she is a lake, what a lake she is
Blue water lilies
born in it with love

Drunk on the pollen of fresh, dewy lips
The valley of dreams
breaks into bloom
This heart grows giddy from a slender heart
Opening wide
on the windowed bed of beauty

A young man stands at the edge of the room where the girl he loves lies sleeping, and the whole song is him hardly daring to breathe so he does not wake her. “Step softly, gently in,” is how it opens, and right away you feel the hush of it. He is watching her rest on a soft bed, and to him even her sleep looks like something sacred. Dreams settle over her the way a flock of birds comes down to roost at dusk, quiet and unhurried, and that single image sets the mood for everything that follows.

The heart of the song is the way he reaches for the gentlest things in nature to describe her. If she is a flower, he says, then what a flower, soft and delicate and made of beauty itself. If she is a lake, then what a lake, with blue water lilies opening on its surface. In Sinhala song the neela induwara, the blue water lily, is the classic image for a woman’s eyes, dark and calm and lovely, so when he calls her a lake with lilies born in it, he is really describing her face in sleep, her closed eyes resting like flowers on still water. Nothing here is loud or hungry. It is all softness, stillness, and a kind of wonder.

By the last verse the wonder tips over into a sweet dizziness. He speaks of being drunk on the pollen of fresh lips, of a whole valley of dreams bursting into bloom, of his heart going giddy. This is the language of someone overcome, not by desire so much as by tenderness, the feeling of loving someone so completely that just being near them while they sleep is almost too much to hold. The melody, carried in T.M. Jayarathne’s warm voice, leaves you with that same gentle ache: the quiet joy of watching over someone you love and wanting nothing more than to keep the moment unbroken.