The speaker argues, in a quietly stubborn way, that places shouldn't be treated as things to buy and sell. The poem begins with a puzzle: a place is "more than a predecessor," more than something that simply came before us. The speaker seems to mean it has its own weight and standing, and that we already sense this, since the line ends on "we know."
The poem then narrows its focus to "a place of ore," land valued for the minerals under it. Selling that kind of place seems especially wrong to the speaker. The last stanza goes back to the very start, imagining life arriving "as a beggar into the void." Life needed a place first, and had nothing to offer in return.
The tone is firm but restrained, almost like a short moral statement. The wordplay on "place" ("in the first place") gives it a dry humor, yet the closing image is humble and a little sad, making land feel like something given, not owned.