Scholars of the poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s (d. 1964) oeuvre have long recognized the central place in his poetics of the Buwayb rivulet in his southern Iraqi hometown of Jaykur. Orit Bashkin, Terri DeYoung, Muhsin J. al-Musawi, Shmuel Moreh, R. C. Ostle, and others have likewise noted the development of his modernist verse following his move to the bustling city of Baghdad to attend the Higher Teachers College. There is, then, some previous scholarly recognition of how Sayyab’s shift from a rural environment to an urban one led to profound developments in his poetic output. Yet a fully-fledged ecocritical reading of Sayyab’s poetry remains to be done. This paper makes an initial foray in this direction through a comparative reading of Sayyab’s 1958 poem “al-Mabgha” (“Whorehouse”), which—both formally and in terms of content—encapsulates his persona’s reflections on the experience of moving from the countryside to the city. Building on DeYoung’s analysis, in Placing the Poet, of Sayyab’s use of a tadmin “poetic quote” from the 9th century poet ʿAli Ibn al-Jahm’s (d. 863) Rusafiyyah ode, the paper turns an ecocritical lens on Sayyab’s invocation of his poetic forebear, who was popularly understood to also be a country “bumpkin” transplanted into the urbane caliphal court in Abbasid Baghdad (Samer Ali, Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages). Through a close analysis of Sayyab’s inclusion of Ibn al-Jahm’s line beginning “Oryx eyes between Rusafah and the Bridge” in his 20th century poem, I argue that “Whorehouse” can be read in an ecocritical vein. The poem not only gestures to the recent history of Iraq’s development into a petrostate but also highlights a longer tradition of poetic reflections on the divide between the rural (figured as an idyll) and the unnatural development of the city, reflected in Sayyab’s and Ibn al-Jahm’s poems through their treatments of Abbasid urban infrastructure projects in the “Rusafah” (i.e., “paved”) district of Baghdad.