Poetry / Caucasia

Caucasia

Welcome to Caucasia, a nation bravely sanitized, where borders are sealed with righteous glue and history is politely denied.

Here we scrub the map with bleach and prayer, erase the messy footnotes of arrival, pretend the boats, the chains, the trains, the trails were just metaphors or worse, inconvenient.

In Caucasia, everyone agrees their ancestors simply appeared, fully clothed, speaking perfect English, clutching deeds, flags, and divine approval.

No accents here only “heritage,” which is just immigration that happened long enough ago to feel entitled.

We celebrate rugged self-reliance, passed down from great-great-grandparents who somehow crossed oceans without crossing oceans, survived winters without help, and founded farms on land that was definitely vacant because silence is easier than memory.

Ellis Island? Never heard of her. The Mayflower? A cruise. Forced migration? Revisionist fiction.

In Caucasia, we pull up ladders and complain about the view. We demand purity in a melting pot and are shocked - shocked! - that the soup tastes like hypocrisy.

We love freedom fiercely, as long as it knows its place, fills out the right forms, and doesn’t ask who built the roads, picked the crops, mined the ore, stitched the uniforms, or died in wars before being told to “go home.”

“Go back where you came from,” we shout, standing proudly on someone else’s bones.

Caucasia dreams of a past that never existed, guarded by people who wouldn’t qualify to enter it.

A country without immigrants just ghosts with amnesia, wearing flags like blindfolds, terrified of mirrors, and furious that history keeps knocking at the door speaking languages they refuse to learn.

Welcome to Caucasia. Population: Everyone who chose to forget how they got here.

--Tom Rodgers 2026