Poems About Belle Chasse, Louisiana

Belle Chasse, Louisiana — Gateway to Lower Plaquemines

Belle Chasse is where the metro ends and the delta begins. You cross the Belle Chasse Tunnel under the Mississippi and the city falls away behind you. Highway 23 takes over. To the south, lower Plaquemines Parish stretches toward the Gulf: orange and citrus groves, oystermen working the bays, the towns of Port Sulphur and Venice at the road's end. The levee walls rise on either side. The river is always close.

The French name translates as la belle chasse: the beautiful hunt. Sugar and citrus built the early economy. The oil and gas industry brought workers south to support the offshore rigs. Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans — NAS JRB — anchors the community with its runways, its base housing, its jets cutting north across the sky. Belle Chasse is diverse in the way that edge-of-the-Gulf communities are diverse: Creole families, Vietnamese-American fishing households, military families rotating through, oil workers who came for the work and stayed for the parish.

Plaquemines Parish is one of the most storm-scarred strips of Louisiana. Much of it sits below sea level. The levees are not scenery. They are the reason people can live here. When the storms come, they test every foot of wall. Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana — Terrebonne Parish, the bayou country, a place that knows exactly what it means to be held in place by a levee and by the life you have built on the wet edge of the continent. That knowledge runs through every page of Dulac Poetry.

Life in Belle Chasse

The Belle Chasse Tunnel is the only way across without a bridge. One lane each direction, through the rock under the Mississippi, the river pressing down from above. Everyone who lives in Belle Chasse has driven it thousands of times. It is a ritual the way a bridge would not be: the tunnel forces a pause, a passage, a brief underground darkness before the world opens up again on the west bank and Highway 23 resumes. People who live there orient their whole geography by the tunnel.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Vietnamese families settled along the Louisiana Gulf Coast in large numbers: Catholics with fishing skills and a willingness to work the difficult water. Belle Chasse and lower Plaquemines Parish absorbed many of them. They rebuilt their lives on oysters and shrimp, on the same bays and channels the Creole and Acadian families had worked for generations before them. Their boats are in the same fleet. Their children go to the same schools. The community carries both histories now.

NAS JRB runs on a schedule the whole community hears. The jets from the naval air station are a constant overhead presence: the training flights, the cargo runs, the military cadence that arrives in waves and then goes quiet. The base housing, the PX, the commissary — a whole parallel economy running alongside the civilian one, military families cycling in and out on rotation while the civilian families stay.

The Plaquemines satsuma is one of Louisiana's most celebrated agricultural exports. The citrus harvest runs through November and December: roadside stands stacked with the small, sweet oranges that grow in the alluvial soil of the lower parish, a soil that the river built over centuries of flooding. You can buy a bag from a stand on Highway 23 and it will be the best orange you have tasted.

Katrina devastated lower Plaquemines Parish in 2005. Belle Chasse itself flooded less than most, but the communities to the south were drowned. The slow disaster continues: la perte de la terre, the loss of the land, the coastal erosion and subsidence that takes a few more feet of Louisiana into the Gulf every year. The towns at the end of Highway 23 are smaller than they were. Each mile south on 23 is a mile further from the city and a mile closer to the water, and the water is always gaining.

Featured Poem: Highway 23

In Mitchell Parfait's voice — driving south out of Belle Chasse on a weekday afternoon, the tunnel behind him, the citrus stands passing on the shoulder, the levee the only horizon. He is from Dulac. He knows roads that run toward the water and do not turn around. He knows what it means to keep moving toward something you cannot quite reach.

The poem closes on something plain and earned: The water is there at the end of everything the way it always is: patient, receiving, indifferent to arrival. That is the knowledge of the lower delta. The water does not hurry. It has already won. What remains is the human decision to keep driving south anyway, past the citrus stands and the levee walls, because the place is worth the knowing. DULAC POETRY holds that knowledge: the road south, the levee horizon, the land disappearing into the Gulf one season at a time.

Belle Chasse in Louisiana Letters

The place names of lower Plaquemines Parish carry their histories in the words themselves. Belle chasse: the beautiful hunt, the French colonial phrase for a territory rich in game and possibility. Plaquemines: from a Native American word for the persimmon tree, the small wild fruit that grew along the river bluffs before the cane fields arrived. The Acadian and Creole roots of this corridor run deep. The oral traditions here are old: the trapping stories, the citrus harvest stories, the hurricane stories that get passed from generation to generation with the same gravity as scripture.

The Vietnamese-American fishing community of lower Louisiana has begun to appear in Gulf Coast storytelling with the weight it deserves. These families came from one body of water and built their lives on another. Their knowledge of the sea translated. Their presence along the Louisiana coast is now woven into the landscape, into the commercial fishing economy, into the community fabric of places like Belle Chasse, Plaquemines Parish, and the bayou parishes further west.

Military-base towns of the American South carry their own literary texture: the transient population against the permanent one, the jets overhead, the disciplined order of base housing against the more improvisational order of the civilian streets just outside the gate. NAS JRB has given Belle Chasse that texture for decades. It is a specific kind of place, and specific kinds of places produce specific kinds of stories.

The themes in Dulac Poetry — faith, water, loss, working by hand, the land that raises you and the land that is taken from you — echo through the lives of everyone who lives at the edge of the delta. Belle Chasse people know those themes. Lower Plaquemines people know them more than most. When you drive south on Highway 23 and watch the land get thinner on either side of the road, you are inside the poem Mitchell Parfait has been writing his whole life. Order DULAC POETRY on Amazon and read it alongside that drive.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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Read Dulac Poetry

If Belle Chasse speaks to you — the tunnel under the Mississippi, the satsuma stands on the shoulder of Highway 23, the jets from NAS JRB crossing north, the levee wall running parallel to the road all the way to the Gulf — the poems in Dulac Poetry were written from the same waterway knowledge. Mitchell Parfait grew up in Dulac, Louisiana: Terrebonne Parish, Bayou Grand Caillou, the edge of the Gulf where the land is always in negotiation with the water. Belle Chasse and Dulac are edge-of-the-Gulf places. They are shaped by the same forces: water, work, faith, the slow disappearance of the land underfoot. Both communities hold their ground the way working-water communities hold their ground — by continuing, by knowing the water, by staying. The book is on Amazon now.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait — paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Poetry from the Gulf Coast, the bayou, and the water's edge.

Poems from the Gulf Coast, the bayou, and the water's edge. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.

If you are looking for poems about Belle Chasse Louisiana — or for Gulf South poetry about Plaquemines Parish, the Belle Chasse Tunnel, NAS JRB, Highway 23, the Vietnamese fishing community, and the Plaquemines satsuma harvest — this is where that work lives. DULAC POETRY is available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0FXVZDLZG. Written from inside the working-water world, by a poet from Dulac, Louisiana — the bayou country, the Gulf South, the same waterway logic that runs from the Belle Chasse Tunnel to the sea.

Read alongside poems about Algiers, Louisiana and poems about Gretna, Louisiana to follow the West Bank and lower Plaquemines corridor from the Orleans Parish line south toward the Gulf. Then read about DULAC POETRY on the book page, or learn about Mitchell Parfait on the author page.

DULAC POETRY — Belle Chasse Louisiana poetry on Amazon. Get Your Copy on Amazon | Buy the Book | Read Dulac Poetry