A good friend of mine sent me the following email. I am reposting it here with his permission. Thanks, Pablo!
I thought you would enjoy this song by Argentinean singer Alberto Cortéz:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSDKJN_C3_g
The translation is:
Don't call me 'foreigner' simply because I was born far away
Or because the land I came from has a different name
Don't call me foreigner because my mother's breast was different
Or because my childhood was couched by a different language of fairy-tales
Don't call me a foreigner , For we both had the light
of the love of a mother, in the songs and the kisses
With which we are dreamt equally by our mothers against their breasts.
Don't call me foreigner, nor think of where I come from,
But rather it is better to know where we're headed, where time is leading us
Don't call me foreigner, because your bread and your fire
calm my hunger and cold, and your roof shelters me
Don't call me foreigner, your wheat is like my wheat
Your hand is like mine, your fire like my fire
And hunger never warns of its coming, it simply changes owners.
And yet you call me a foreigner because I was brought by a different path,
Because I was born in another village, because I know different oceans
And one day I sailed from another port.. If they're always the same,
The waving handkerchiefs in farewell, and the blurry pupils of those
we leave behind, the friends that call us, and the kisses are always the same,
And the love of the one who dreams with the day of your return.
Don't call me a foreigner, we carry the same cry
The same old weariness that man has carried
from the depths of time, when there were no borders,
Before they came, those who divide and kill,
Who steal and lie, those who sell our dreams,
It is they who invented that word: Foreigner.
Don't call me a foreigner, it is a sad word,
It is a chilly word, it smells of oblivion and exile
Don't call me a foreigner: look at your child and mine
How they run hand in hand to the end of the path
Don't call me a foreigner- they know nothing of languages,
Of limits and flags, see how they float skywards
By a dovelike laugh that reunites them in flight
Don't call me a foreigner, think of your brother and mine
The body full of bullets kissing the ground in death
They were not foreigners: They always knew each other
Through the eternal liberty, and they died just as free.
Don't call me a foreigner, look well into my eyes
Far beyond the hatred, of envy and fear
And you will see that I am a Man: I cannot be a foreigner!
~Pablo Romero, Tenor
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