NO MEN ARE FOREIGN

 

             

NO MEN ARE FOREIGN       

          It is painful to see that the people of the world do not meet as one family and as the children of the one heavenly father. They live in separate lands, follow different faiths, speak different languages, and have different manners and styles in a number of life’s activities. But their bodies have the same universal structure. They are subject to almost the same diseases and the medicines which are used to treat them are identical in the whole world.  They walk upon the same earth which God created and their sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, the seasons, the span of life and the law of mortality are absolutely similar to those which are meant for all the nations of the world. In a Shakespearian play The Merchant of Venice, Shylock who is a Jew asks his Christian listeners:

 

          “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heated by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

         

          Given below are some lines from the poem No Men Are Foreign written by the  English poet and translator James Kirkup (1918-2009):

 

          Remember, no men are strange, no countries foreign,

Beneath all uniforms, a single body breathes

Like ours; the land our brothers walk upon

Is earth like this, in which we all shall lie.

They, too, aware of sun and air water,

Are led by peaceful harvests, by war’s long winter starv’d.

Their hands are ours, and in their lines we read

A labour not different from our own.

Remember, they have eyes like ours that wake

Or sleep, and strength that can be won

By love……………………………………………….

Let us remember, whenever we are told

To hate our brothers, it is ourselves

That we shall dispossess, betray, condemn.

Remember, we who take arms against each other.

It is the human earth that we defile,

Our hells of fire and dust outrage the innocence

Of air, that is everywhere our own.       

                                      ********

G.R.Kanwal

24 September 2025