Poems About Braithwaite, Louisiana
Original poetry about Braithwaite, Louisiana by Mitchell Parfait : the east bank community on Highway 39 where the back levee gave way during Hurricane Isaac in 2012, the water that came from the wrong direction, and the families who stayed and rebuilt.
By Mitchell Parfait · Dulac, Louisiana · October 24, 2025 · 7 min read · Braithwaite & Plaquemines Parish
A quiet working-class community south of Belle Chasse on the east bank of the Mississippi, sitting between the river levee and the back marsh, on a stretch of Highway 39 that most people pass through without stopping.
Braithwaite, Louisiana: Quiet East Bank, Wide River
Braithwaite sits on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish, along Highway 39 between Belle Chasse and Pointe-a-la-Hache. The community is unincorporated and largely off the tourist map: no festival, no historic district, no landmark that draws visitors from outside the parish. What it has is the river. The locals call this stretch le fleuve de l'est, the river of the east bank, a place where the Mississippi runs wide and the levee fills the western sky.
The land here is narrow. To the west, the levee. To the east, the back marsh, the old cane fields going soft, the edge of the wetlands that do not stop until the Gulf. The community between those two margins is working-class in the way that phrase actually means something: farming families, fishing families, refinery workers on rotating shifts, some who commute to the West Bank for jobs and come home to Braithwaite because this is where they are from.
Life in Braithwaite: Isaac, the Levee, and the East Bank
In late August 2012, Hurricane Isaac stalled over southeast Louisiana and refused to move. The front levee, the one that faces the Mississippi, held. But Braithwaite is protected from the marsh side by an older, lower earthen structure, and Isaac overwhelmed it. What came into the community was not the river breaking through. It was l'eau qui monte, the rising water, creeping in from the back marsh as the storm piled rain and surge against the softer side of the parish for two straight days.
Hundreds of homes took water. Families were evacuated by boat. The flooding was not the sudden violence of Katrina but the slow kind: water at the edge of the yard at dusk, water in the living room by midnight, water pressing against the second floor by morning. The east bank levee politics had long been a sore point. The main federal levee protected the west bank and the front face of the east bank parishes. The back levees, the ones that sat between the communities and the marsh, were a different matter, a different budget, a different priority.
The community rebuilt. Farming families are still here. Fishing families still run boats out of the small landings along Highway 39. The commuters still cross the river to work and come back to Braithwaite in the evening because the east bank is where the family land is, where the generations are stacked, where leaving would mean giving up something that cannot be replaced by living somewhere easier.
Featured Poem: Braithwaite, 2012
In Mitchell Parfait's voice: Isaac stalling over the parish, the back levee giving way, the water that came not from the river but from the marsh side, the families on rooftops along Highway 39. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community that has its own reckoning with the water that comes from directions you did not expect.
Braithwaite, 2012
The sky had gone green by noon.
Isaac was slow, everyone knew it,
stalling over the parishes,
grinding down instead of passing through.
They said the front levee would hold.
It held. The river stayed where it was.
But Braithwaite sits between two waters:
the Mississippi to the west, the marsh to the east,
and the back levee was earthen, old,
built for less than what Isaac brought.
By nightfall the marsh was rising.
The water came slow at first,
a thin shine at the edge of the yard,
then the yard was the water,
then the porch,
then the door.
Families on Highway 39
stood on their rooftops in the dark.
The front levee, the river levee,
the one the money maintained,
was dry on the other side.
They rebuilt. Some came back the same year.
Some took longer. A few did not come back.
But Braithwaite is still there,
between the river and the marsh,
between the levee that held
and the one that gave way.
The levee held everywhere else.
Here it didn't.
The poem closes on the distinction that defines Braithwaite in 2012: The levee held everywhere else. Here it didn't. The engineering protected the rest of the east bank while this community flooded. That asymmetry is the whole story, and it is the kind of precision DULAC POETRY carries throughout.
Plaquemines Parish: Recurring Loss and Quiet Endurance
Plaquemines Parish is a place that has learned loss at close range: Katrina in 2005, Isaac in 2012, the slow attrition of coastal land eroding into the Gulf, the thinning of communities that once stretched the full length of Highway 39 on the east bank and Highway 23 on the west. What remains is not diminished so much as distilled. The people who stay in Braithwaite, in Grand Bayou Village, in Pointe-a-la-Hache, in Buras, are there because the place holds something that cannot be replicated elsewhere and that leaving would cost more than flooding.
Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community that understands that calculus. His poetry in Dulac Poetry draws from the same world as Braithwaite: the working families, the water coming from directions you did not prepare for, the decision to rebuild as a form of faithfulness to the land and to the generations already there. He writes the Gulf South not as a region in decline but as a place of recurring loss and quiet endurance, two qualities that Braithwaite knows well.
From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.
DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon
Explore Dulac Poetry on Amazon
If the landscapes of Plaquemines Parish and the Louisiana Gulf Coast move you: the quiet east bank community on Highway 39, the back levee that overtopped while the river levee held, the farming and fishing families who rebuilt in the same place because there was no better answer. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world in verse. Written from Dulac, Louisiana, a community that knows the water from every direction and has built its life alongside it regardless.
DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Poetry from the east bank, the back levee, and the working communities of Plaquemines Parish and the Gulf South.
Find more poems about lower Louisiana at Pointe-a-la-Hache, Grand Bayou Village, Buras, Empire, Belle Chasse, and the bayou parishes of the Gulf South. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.
Poems from the east bank of the Mississippi, the back levee, and the communities of Plaquemines Parish. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.
Poetry From Braithwaite and the East Bank
The back levee that overtopped. The water coming from the marsh side while the river stayed put. The families on rooftops along Highway 39, and the ones who came back and rebuilt because this is where they are from.
Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana: bayou country, Gulf South, the inherited knowledge of water and what it does to the communities that choose to stay. His book DULAC POETRY is available now on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99).
Written from the Louisiana Gulf Coast waterways by Mitchell Parfait.