People tend not to think of Detroit on Earth Day because they don't think cities are part of nature, and that's a little bit of a problem. Jamaal May touches on the dangers of this misconception in his poem, "There Are Birds Here," which you can find in The Big Book of Exit Strategies, available at local bookstore.

A few notes:

• The idea that cities aren't part of nature derives partly from white Western literature's obsessive idealization of the pastoral, the place where poets rest upon tufts of grass and contemplate Man and Nature through the humble life of the yeoman, or through the pure pleasure of the wind passing through the prairies, or whatever. (There are many important exceptions to this generalization, of course, but stick with me.) It's God's country, but it's the devil's town. Looking at this constructed urban/nature binary with a racial lens, as Camille T. Dungy does in her incredible anthology, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry, is illuminating. "Black people have been typically working in the land, and that's not part of the idyllic version of things," Dungy said in an interview with NPR. "And then also the majority of African-Americans have tended to live in urban landscapes, and so there's a very different view, quite often, of the natural world."

• In "There Are Birds Here," May is desperately trying to point out that the view of nature as the pretty play of light and shadow, of bird and breadcrumbs, exists in the city, too. But as he ticks off all this natural imagery, he has to constantly correct the assumptions of a "they," who "won’t stop saying / how lovely the ruins, / how ruined the lovely / children must be in that birdless city." This is another kind of stereotyping, and it reveals the danger of the false urban/rural divide. Condemning the people who live in cities—i.e. black and brown people—to a state of perpetual birdlessness robs them of their humanity, their naturalness, and turns them into "ruins," perpetually failed non-entities who aren't even part of nature.

• The memento mori that haunt every natural image May mentions is an indictment of poverty porn pushers, but it's also a nod to the real and pervasive threats to black life in the city. The "they" in this poem also includes the speaker, and the fact that the speaker nevertheless continues to assert the title's claim makes the poem all the more powerful.