On After Birth by Camille T. Dungy
by Wayne Miller
Hi, I’m Wayne Miller. I’m a poet who lives in Denver, Colorado, and I’m here for Poets on the Plains.
Today I’m going to read a poem by the poet Camille T. Dungy.
Dungy was born in 1972 in Denver, grew up in California, and graduated high school in Iowa. She now lives in Fort Collins and teaches at Colorado State University. She’s one of only two poets I’m going to feature in this series who was actually born in Colorado—which isn’t particularly strange, given that only 42% of current Coloradoans are from here.
Dungy has published four books of poetry and two essay collections, and she has edited two anthologies. She has won numerous awards for her work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Dungy is African American, and for some time now she has advocated for the work of Black writers writing about nature, since nature has often been falsely viewed as primarily a subject of white writers. Her anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry pushes back forcefully against that idea, as does, in a more personal way, her essay collection Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.
Her poetry collection Trophic Cascade was published in 2017. The title is an ecological term that refers to how changes in one animal’s behavior can impact an ecosystem all along the food chain. (For example, when wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park, their predation on elk reduced the elk population, allowing the plants the elk grazed on to re-flourish, which in turn drew more songbirds to the park, which drew more birds of prey, etc.
Dungy’s book focuses on the natural world—with its ecological fragility and entangledness—and it thinks in particular about motherhood in those larger contexts. Motherhood is, after all, a fundamental part of the natural world. And motherhood changes an individual’s world forever; the arrival of a child into a mother’s life creates a kind of personal trophic cascade.
The poem I’m going to read is called “After Birth.” Note that that is two words—“after birth”—not the single word “afterbirth.” Dungy isn’t referring to the delivery of the placenta—she’s referring to what happens to new mothers after their children are born.
After Birth
The new mothers sleep, always, in their clothes
since all their doors have been opened,
since they learned every room is a part of every other room.
The new mothers are just like the old mothers.
Common as suburban deer, the new mothers see human faces,
human faces, human faces, all these windows,
every garden trampled, every feeder
emptied to spite hunger not as lovely as a birds’,
and winter coming on.
About time, the new mothers are cooperative.
They measure months by the length of an arm,
the proportion of leg muscle to belly fat.
They will wait several weeks for a minute.
The trees dropped their fruit and all of us
were drawn to it. Was a time, before,
when this field was wide and welcoming.
Every door has been opened. Empty windows,
empty windows, empty windows, now, their wombs.
The new mothers live in the open, pacing the hours.
About dreams, they are like animals,
the new mothers.
Mouths to feed and flanks to warm.
Everything cleared out
and winter coming on.
Camile T. Dungy from Trophic Cascade
(Wesleyan University Press, 2017)
I love how Dungy presents the new mothers through two primary metaphors: they are like animals, and they are like houses opened forever to the world. Dungy keeps teasing these metaphors through repetitions and subtle shifts until they collide—those opened houses can no longer keep the natural world out; the mothers can no longer maintain the illusion that they are separate from the natural world. They’re part of nature—which also means aging and death, those unavoidable natural processes—are ahead of them, represented by that image of winter approaching a house emptied and thrown open to the elements.
I’m Wayne Miller. Thanks for listening.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
WAYNE MILLER (b. 1976) is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The End of Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 2025). His awards include the Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards, a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Translation Fellowship, six awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright to Northern Ireland. He has co-translated two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac (Zephyr Press, 2015)—and he has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016). He lives in Denver, where he teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and edits the journal Copper Nickel. http://waynemillerpoet.com/
FEATURED POET
CAMILLE T. DUNGY (b. 1972) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently the Colorado Book Award–winner Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), and two books of nonfiction: Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). She has also edited two anthologies, most recently Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009). Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, an American Book Award, and two NAACP Image Award nominations. She teaches at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. https://camilledungy.com/
