Counting Waves

By Lozan Yamolky

Counting waves is a poetry book by local BC author Lozan Yamolky

• Language: English
• Publisher: Silver Bow Publishing
• Release date: Oct 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781927616567

Book preview

Counting Waves

Copyright 2017 Lozan Yamolky

Smashwords Edition

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not

be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book

with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If

you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for

your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own

copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

ISBN: 978-1-927616-56-7

"I've learned that people will forget what you said,

people will forget what you did,

but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Maya Angelou

Silver Bow Publishing

Box 5, 720 Sixth Street,

New Westminster, BC V3C 3C5 CANADA

Dedication

I am honoured to dedicate my second book of poetry to my maternal grandmother. I never knew her

story but only recently I came to know some shocking details about her. Her story is still unraveling and

being traced as I write this, but so far this is what I have been told about her childhood.

Nana Fatim survived the Armenian genocide as an infant and was adopted by a Kurdish couple who

raised her in northern Iraq. Shortly after her adopted father passed away, as a preteen, she was given to

marriage. The laws in Iraq at the time gave young men discharge from serving in the military if they

marry a young orphan girl. She moved permanently to Baghdad in the late 1940s. She gave birth to five

boys and two girls. Shortly after her last child was born in 1965, her husband tragically and suddenly

died. She cared for all of the children on her own in their one room home. I am one of the many

grandchildren from her eldest daughter, Shafika. My mother gave birth to me in Nana Fatim’s room that

was located in one of the poorest rundown neighborhoods in the heart of the capital city of Iraq.

Nana Fatim was incapable of hating, judging, criticizing or mistreating anyone no matter who they were.

My earliest memories were of her holding me. She was warm, she was soft and she had beautiful tiny

eyes. She treated every one of us with such love that none of us felt favored or loved less that the other.

She loved us all, even the naughty ones and even our dad who, sometimes, was a very mean and angry

man.

She was the woman who told me time and again, when others hurt me and she’d find me crying, to pray

good prayers for those who hurt us because if we curse them, she said, the evil spirit will hear those

prayers and that person will become worse than he or she already is. Their heart, she’d say, will get

hardened even more if you hate them. She told us when you fill your heart with love and ‘Eiman‘ (faith),

there