To My Caucasian Brothers and Sisters
I will not call you loudly.
Love spoken too openly
loses its edge in the mountains.
So I say nothing—
and yet everything is said.
Adyghe wind,
Circassian silence,
Armenian stone that remembers hands long gone,
Georgian wine fermenting grief into song,
Ossetian passes where footsteps echo even after centuries,
Kabardian pride,
Balkarian patience carved into cliffs.
You will never hear me say it.
You do not need to.
Our blood does not ask for flags.
Our bones know each other already.
In the way the mountains lean inward at night,
as if listening,
as if guarding a secret older than empires.
Empires came anyway.
Heavy boots.
Foreign winters.
Russians stood in the passes,
not because they belonged there,
but because they feared what could not be bent.
They built borders where paths once breathed.
They renamed what did not need names.
They mistook silence for surrender.
Still—
when snow falls,
it falls the same on all of us.
If we never unite,
let it not be said we forgot.
Let it not be said we bowed.
I carry you quietly.
In my spine.
In my refusal to become small.
In my instinct to look north,
toward stone and silence and endurance.
You don’t need to know this love.
Mountains don’t need witnesses.
But let the world know—
that even with Russians in our way,
even separated,
even unnamed,
even scattered like seeds across time—
I loved you
as one loves something too ancient to possess.