Poems About Buras, Louisiana

Buras: The Citrus Capital of Plaquemines Parish

Drive south on Highway 23 along the west bank of the Mississippi River and you pass through a landscape that carries its history in layers. The levee road runs parallel to the river on one side and the back marsh on the other, the narrow strip of habitable ground that has held the communities of lower Plaquemines Parish for generations. Between Empire to the north and the Boothville corridor to the south, you come to Buras, and Buras carries a history that most people who have never driven this road do not know: this was the citrus capital of Plaquemines Parish, and Plaquemines Parish was once the largest orange-producing parish in Louisiana.

The scale of what was planted here is not easy to hold in the imagination now. The orange groves of the Buras area ran along the west bank levee road for miles, tree after tree in rows that went back from the highway toward the levee, the fruit hanging heavy in October and November, the smell of citrus so thick in the air that you could place yourself by it. Plaquemines Parish oranges were known across the Gulf South for their sweetness, fed by the alluvial soil the Mississippi had been depositing here for centuries. The Satsuma variety in particular grew exceptionally well in this climate, and the harvest season drew workers from across south Louisiana to the groves along Highway 23.

Buras sat at the center of that citrus world. The packing sheds and loading docks along the levee road moved tonnage that would be remarkable for any agricultural region in Louisiana, and this was a community built on narrow land at the bottom of a parish that ran out of elevation before it ran out of productivity. The groves were the economic backbone of the lower west bank corridor, and Buras was where that backbone was strongest.

Life in Buras: Citrus Harvests, Shrimping Families, Katrina, and the Groves That Came Back

The working life of Buras was built on two economies that ran side by side along the west bank levee road. The citrus growers planted and tended les orangers, the orange trees that gave the lower corridor its identity, moving through the seasonal rhythms of thinning and irrigating and harvesting, the October fruit that arrived reliably enough to plan a life around. And alongside the groves, the shrimping and oystering families worked the bayou and Gulf access that the west bank location provided, running boats out through the intracoastal and the lower passes to the same productive waters that had supported this community since before the groves were planted.

The two economies did not compete. The citrus grower and the shrimper often lived on the same block, their children going to the same school, their households structured around the same seasonal logic of abundance and conservation, the good year and the hard year, the storm that took half the crop and the season that made up for it. This is the texture of life on the lower west bank that most Louisiana history books do not bother to record: communities that held multiple economies at once, that knew the land and the water with equal intimacy, that built a life on the narrow strip between the river and the marsh.

Hurricane Katrina arrived on August 29, 2005, and the west bank of Plaquemines Parish took one of the most catastrophic storm surges in the entire metropolitan area. The levees along the west bank were overtopped. The water that came over was not the gradual flooding of a rising river but the sudden surge pushing north through the lower delta, and it came into the Buras community with a force that destroyed structures that had stood for decades. Many residents who evacuated before the storm returned to find their houses gone or uninhabitable. Many did not come back. The population of the Buras area contracted sharply after 2005, and the citrus industry that had defined the community never fully recovered to its pre-Katrina scale.

But the story does not end with the storm. Some families stayed. Some came back. And some of those families returned to the groves. The replanting was not on the scale of what had been lost, and the labor and investment required to bring an orange grove back from a catastrophic surge is enormous, but it happened. A few groves along the west bank levee road are producing again. The packing infrastructure is reduced. The scale is smaller. But in October, when the Satsumas are ready, the smell of citrus still finds you on Highway 23, and that is not nothing. That is exactly the kind of persistence that defines what Buras is.

Featured Poem: Buras

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the orange groves that ran along the levee road for miles, the scale of what was planted and what it smelled like in October, what the storm surge took in 2005, and what a few families brought back. The poem holds loss and persistence at the same time, the way the place itself does. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same insistence on staying in the difficult place, on planting again after the flood, is the inherited logic of the community.

The poem closes on the three lines that hold what Buras is: The oranges still come in October. / Not like before. / But they come. It is not a triumph. It is an honest accounting of what persistence looks like in a community that has absorbed a catastrophic loss and not entirely recovered. The qualification matters: not like before. But the fact also matters: they come. That gap between what was and what remains is where the poem lives, and it is where Buras lives.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Places That Persist Through Catastrophe

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the water is never far from anything and the question of what endures after the storm is not abstract but immediate and personal. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through the working-water and working-land communities of coastal Louisiana, from the bayou parishes to the lower Plaquemines Parish corridor and the Highway 23 communities that defined themselves by what they grew and caught and built on difficult ground. Buras sits squarely in those concerns.

The tradition Parfait writes from is one that does not flinch at loss but also does not reduce a place to its worst moment. Buras is not only the storm surge of 2005. It is the groves that ran for miles along the levee road, the families who built their lives around the October harvest, the oystering and shrimping that ran alongside the citrus economy, the specific sweetness of the Satsuma that the alluvial soil of lower Plaquemines Parish produced. And it is also the families who planted again, who accepted that not like before was the honest frame and still found it worth the work. That particular resolution, holding the full scale of what was lost while still affirming what remains, is the work that this poetry does.

The working-land life of Buras parallels the working-water life of Dulac in ways that Parfait understands from the inside. Both communities built generational knowledge around a specific resource, both took catastrophic hits from Katrina, and both rebuilt partially, incompletely, honestly. The poetry does not pretend otherwise. It holds what is true: the oranges still come in October, not like before, but they come, and that is the whole truth of the place.

Dulac Poetry on Amazon is where this work is collected: Gulf Coast poems of working land and working water, of the communities along Highway 23 and the bayou corridors that most American poetry has never thought to visit, written by a poet from Dulac, Louisiana who knows what it means to plant again after the flood and call what grows enough.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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If Buras holds you: the orange groves that ran for miles along the west bank levee road before Katrina, the citrus smell that still finds you in October on Highway 23, the families who lost the full scale of what they had planted and planted again anyway. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same commitment to working difficult ground holds: the land defines the life, the harvest is what you have, and the people who replant after the flood are the people who know what the place is worth.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the west bank levee road, the citrus groves, and the Gulf South communities that endure.

Find more poems about the west bank Plaquemines Parish corridor at Empire, Port Sulphur, Venice, Boothville, and Ironton. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Buras, Louisiana, in Plaquemines Parish on the west bank of the Mississippi River along Highway 23, the citrus capital of a parish that grew the sweetest oranges in Louisiana, the community that Katrina nearly erased and that some families brought back. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.