Inspiring words by Lozan Yamolky

Last week, local poet Lozan Yamolky visited my class at Simon Fraser Continuing Studies. This poet speaks Kurdish, Arabic and English. Growing up in Baghdad and northern Iraq, she witnessed war and other human atrocities at first hand. Lozan has been in Canada for over twenty years and she arrived as a refugee.

In spite of the difficult topics she writes about, her poetry is full of wisdom, tolerance, love and light. With three books of poetry out, she's just been commissioned to write a poem that will be set to music a Toronto orchestra creating a special performance on refugees.

A favourite line of her poetry is from a poem entitled "Go Back Where You Came From." After enumerating all the reasons why she cannot go back, the narrator addresses the reader with these words of innocent encouragement:

"But you, you can go back. Go back to the time before you learned how to hate."