Skip to content

Scottish Poetry Library

Register/Sign in
Shopping Bag Shopping Bag
Bringing people and poems together
  • Home
  • Poetry
    • Poets
    • Poems
    • Makar – National Poet
      • Our Waking Breath: A Poem-letter from Scotland to Ukraine
      • A Woman’s A Woman
      • The story of the Makar – National Poet of Scotland
    • Best Scottish Poems
    • Spiorad an Àite
      Spirit of Place
    • The Trysting Thorns
    • Poetry Ambassadors
      Tosgairean na Bàrdachd
      • Poetry Commissions: Walter Scott 250
        Coimiseanan Bàrdachd: Walter Scott 250
      • Poetry Ambassadors 2021
    • Poetry Ambassadors 2020
    • Posters
    • Podcasts
  • Library
    • Become a borrower
    • Catalogue
    • Collections
    • Ask a librarian
    • Copyright enquiries
  • Learning
    • SQA set texts
    • Learning resources
    • Designing sensory poetry activities
    • Children’s poems in Scots
    • National Poetry Day archive
    • New to poetry?
    • Advice for poets
  • Events
    • What’s On
    • Meeting rooms and venue hire
    • Exhibitions
  • Shop
    • Poetry Highlights
    • Entropie Books
    • Stichill Marigold Press
    • Poems for Doctors, Nurses & Teachers
    • Scottish Poetry
    • Poetry Pamphlet Cards
    • Help
  • About us
    • Our story
    • Our people
    • Jobs
    • Company Papers & Policies
    • Our projects
    • Our building
    • FAQs
    • Find us
  • Support us
    • Become a Friend
    • Donate
  • Blog
Shopping BagShopping Bag
Ask a librarian
  • Home
  • >
  • Poetry
  • >
  • Janette Ayachi
  • >
  • New Mother
Donate Donate icon Ask a Librarian Ask a Librarian icon

New Mother

Janette Ayachi

One swipe of the sonogram
and the midwife had the sex predicted

she stacked away files like over-sized
tarot cards shuffling through the blood work

slicking the lubricated wand back and forth
like an upturned hourglass to spell out the word

‘girl’ on the Ouija board of my bulging stomach.
I folded the scan picture like a brewing secret

gave a copy to my mother, the gift of birth passed down
the hands of women, a flat lithograph, grainier

than a memory, a gelatine print,
a boneless x-ray, an alien woodcut.

Not long after that my body shivered
into postpartum, chartreuse light levered

its way through shadows and I became one of the new
mothers wandering the hospital corridors in cotton gowns;

trying on rooms like shoes, barefoot and barren
slotting coins into payphones mechanically calling

future selves to check in, stomachs deflated and slack,
eyes bloodshot like raw steak, darker than forest shadow.

This is the metamorphosis, a new skin shed, the older part
locked in a bathroom somewhere starving and slightly sad

stepping back further into previous chapters
so when winter strips the trees of their bark

we will stand naked in the mirror
and call out our own names.


Janette Ayachi

From Hand Over Mouth Music (Liverpool University Press, 2019)

Reproduced by kind permission of the author.

Tags:

change happiness mothers

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2019. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2019 was Roseanne Watt.

Editor’s Note:

Like the image of the sonogram, here is a poem that moves masterfully between the sounds of light and shadow, capturing the shifting dimensions of new motherhood. I am besotted with the way Ayachi finds the perfect similes for her images, in the stacked files ‘like over-sized/tarot cards’, ‘trying on rooms like shoes’, ‘eyes bloodshot like raw steak’. The poem seeks vitality even in the moments of a difficult postpartum phase, and in its midst we are nonetheless left with an affirming reclamation of identity by the final lines.

Author’s note:

This poem is about the biggest magic trick in the world; birth and the transformation women go through as a mother for the first time. It is something so spiritual but entirely physical, as if labour is a portal to both transcendence and presence. As we leave and return we are almost cracked out of form, (the only way to transcend the pain; the body self-satisfies, feeds the brain natural chemicals, offers an escape route.) The whole journey felt as if I was coming up on ecstasy in fact, one long trip from the initial rush on swallowing the news of pregnancy; the waiting for it to kick, the way you love something forever and then finally get to meet it climax and as you do, face to face, you shed a skin, slip into another being; a becoming, a new shape, a mother. Some come-down postnatal experiences can be worse than others, not all women (metaphorically) fistpump and breast pump with a glow stick and their baby on the gurney! There is a moment of feeling lost, the burden of metamorphosis, you won’t find your old self again, but you can search for future semblances through growth, evolution, a closer understanding of miracle, sacrifice, and of unconditional love.

Listen

Share this
Facebook
Twitter
Email

Learn more

Best Scottish Poems 2019: English

edited by Roseanne Watt
Find out more

Janette Ayachib. 1982

Ayachi’s first full poetry collection, ‘Hand Over Mouth Music’ (Pavilion: Liverpool University Press), won the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Literary Award 2019.
More about Janette Ayachi

Podcasts

Our audio programme of poets, poems and news for you to listen to.
Listen Now
  • Newsletter signup
  • Accessibility
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
Scottish Poetry Library
5 Crichton's Close, Canongate
Edinburgh EH8 8DT
Tel: +44 (0)131 557 2876
© Scottish Poetry Library 2022.
The Scottish Poetry Library is a registered charity (No. SCO23311).
City of Edinburgh logo Green Arts Initiative logo Creative Scotland logo
Scottish Poetry Library