Selling Manhattan

“Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit” by Joy Harjo (1989)

An eloquent elegiac prose poem, written by America’s first Indigenous American Poet Laureate, it expresses its Indigenous speaker’s sense of the power of nature to create and sustain life despite humanity’s greed and disregard for the reverence such power should command. Unlike Duffy’s poem, Harjo’s poem draws on the idea that nature is simply too wide, too powerful, and too animated to fear the puny efforts of humanity to destroy it.

“Gentle Now, Don’t Add to the Heartache” by Juliana Spahr (2005)

This longer poem, published some 20 years after Duffy’s, expounds on the elegiac sense of loss that pervades Duffy’s closing stanza. The poem regards the relationship between Western civilization and nature and how lyrical and eloquent its artists are about nature, but how destructive and unrepentant its industrialists, developers, and politicians. It is a supreme expression of the despair at the heart of eco-literature.

“The Natives of America” by Ann Plato (1841)

An examination of the multiracial identity of the American experiment, the poem was written by a pioneering figure in American poetry. Plato was part Black and part Indigenous; she brings that complex perspective into her analysis here of how the North American continent positioned America to be a distinctly-unique society, a culture of cooperation, harmony, and respect.