Poems About Change — When the Tide Turns and You Have to Let It

What Most Change Poems Get Wrong

Search the internet for poems about change and most of what comes back has the same shape. Embrace it. Trust the process. The caterpillar becomes the butterfly. The seasons turn for a reason. Greeting-card grammar in the voice of a yoga instructor who has never had a season turn against her. The poems are written with a kind of bright, well-lit distance — the language of a person who is already safe on the other shore looking back at the water.

That isn't the reader who needed the poem. The reader who needed the poem isn't safe yet. They are still standing on the dock with the rope in their hand, watching the boat pull away, or watching the boat not come back. They are mid-move, mid-grief, mid-divorce, mid-diagnosis, mid-everything. They don't need to be told the change will be good for them. They need someone to sit down beside them and not look away.

Most poetry about change is written after the change. By someone with the benefit of distance and the comfort of having survived. The reader who needs the poem most is the one who hasn't survived it yet — who doesn't know whether they will. The poems they need have to come from someone who has been there with them, in that exact spot, and stayed.

Mitchell Parfait grew up in Dulac, Louisiana, in a community of shrimpers and fishermen and women who watched the water for a living. He has seen the season turn enough times to know that the best poems about life changing aren't triumphant. They're honest. They name the thing that's ending and don't hurry the reader past the naming. You can read more about Mitchell on the about page.

If you came here looking for permission to feel the weight of what's ending, this is the right place. That's the kind of writing you'll find in DULAC POETRY.

Change in a Place Like Dulac

In Dulac, Louisiana, change isn't theoretical. It isn't a slide deck about adapting to disruption. It's the tide. It is the heron on the dock yesterday and the empty piling today. It's the season that turns whether anyone is ready, and the water that does not consult the people who depend on it.

Three pictures, three kinds of change a Dulac poem knows how to sit with.

The season turning. White shrimp in spring, brown shrimp in summer. The boats know without asking. The men know without asking. The change happens whether anyone agrees with it or not, and the agreement was never being requested. You learn, growing up here, that some things just turn. Calendar pages. Tides. Lives.

The son who leaves for the city. A father teaches a boy to mend a net for fifteen years. He shows him how to hold the shuttle, how to keep the tension even, how to find the broken place by feel. One afternoon the boy says he wants to be an engineer. The father is proud. The father is also, that night, alone with the net. Both of those things are true at the same time, and a real change-poem leaves them both standing.

The boat that doesn't come back. The most Dulac kind of change. No one talks about it the day it happens. The dock goes quiet. The radio goes quiet. People bring food and don't stay long. They talk about it ten years later, with a quiet voice, while looking at the water, the way you talk about a thing that was never quite finished saying itself.

In a place like Dulac, the best poems about accepting change aren't motivational. They're descriptive. The water doesn't ask. You don't bargain with it. You learn to hold what it gives and what it takes and to keep showing up at the dock the next morning. You can read a free excerpt and feel what that voice sounds like before you decide.

Why Accepting Change Is Different From Giving Up

There's a quiet but important distinction the reader who needs these poems is usually trying to make on their own. Acceptance gets a bad reputation in this country because people keep confusing it with surrender. They think to accept a thing is to approve of it. To stop fighting it. To say it didn't matter.

Poems about moving on get the same bad reputation. People think moving on means forgetting. Or replacing. Or pretending the loss never happened in the first place. As if the person who moves on is the one who cared less.

That isn't what either word means in Dulac. Acceptance is the opposite of forgetting. It is carrying without putting down. It is the shrimper who keeps the boat name even after the boat is gone. It is the widow who still sets the table for two on Sundays — not because she's stuck, but because love doesn't end where logistics do. A real change-poem honors that distinction. It does not ask the reader to be lighter than they are.

The same is true for poems about starting over. Starting over does not mean pretending you have a clean slate. The slate was never clean. It was written on by everything you've already lived. Starting over, in Dulac, looks like beginning the next thing while still holding the last one with respect. Like painting a new boat name onto a hull whose hold still smells like the last twenty years.

Faith threads quietly through this. Not the loud kind. In a place like Dulac, faith isn't a slogan or a slide. It's the weight that lets a person carry what they cannot fix. It is what keeps a man on the dock at first light when nothing about the morning is promising. Mitchell's full collection — DULAC POETRY — sits with the reader through that exact distinction.

The Poem That Sits With You Through It

Most poetry about transitions in life is read once and forgotten. It's a quote on a graduation card. A line on Instagram with a sunrise behind it. It does its job in the moment, and then it goes away, the way most things written for the occasion do.

A real change-poem is different. It's the one you keep coming back to. The one you read once when your father got sick, again when you moved out of the house you grew up in, again when your kid left for college, again the morning after the funeral. The same poem, doing different work each time. It stayed because it wasn't trying to fix you. It was just willing to keep you company.

Why does Mitchell's poetry work that way? Because it doesn't tell you how to feel. It just keeps you company. Mitchell writes the way an old friend talks — plain, specific, earned. He names the thing without trying to fix it. He lets the silence after the line be part of the line. That is what makes a poem stay.

The pieces in DULAC POETRY that hold up best across changes aren't even, on their face, about change. They are about a father watching his son rig a line for the first time, knowing the boy will outgrow the dock. About a porch light left on after the funeral. About a woman who keeps bringing groceries to a husband who passed two years ago. These are not poems about change. They are poems that survive change with you. They are still useful when you are, again, mid-something, and need someone to sit beside you and not look away.

For Anyone Standing at a Threshold Right Now

If you're reading this in June, there's a good chance you're standing at a threshold. June is a month of them — a graduation, a move, a marriage, a divorce, a diagnosis, a loss, a child leaving home, a parent slowing down. Something behind you and something ahead and you, in the doorway, not quite belonging to either side.

June is also a month of thresholds because of Father's Day. For a lot of us, Father's Day this year doesn't feel the way it did five years ago. Maybe Dad has slowed. Maybe Dad is gone. Maybe you are the dad now, and the boy who used to climb on your shoulders is taller than you, and that's its own quiet kind of change. None of that fits on a card. All of it fits in a poem.

A copy of DULAC POETRY is a way to give someone words for what they're feeling at a moment of change. It's a small book. It fits in a card. It doesn't try to fix anything. It just sits with them, the way a friend would, the way the tide does, the way Dulac itself sits with the people who live there.

And if you also need words for what you're hoping for, read poems about hope. Or for what you're still reaching toward, poems about dreams. Or for what's holding you upright through the change, poems about strength and resilience. And before you decide, you can always read a few of the poems on the excerpt page.

The tide goes out. The tide also comes back. You can let both be true at once. That, in the end, is what the best poems about change are for — to hold the going out and the coming back in the same hand, without forcing either one to hurry.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

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