Poems About Children — Written at the Water's Edge Where They First Learned to Fish

What Children Know About the Water

The first thing a child learns on a boat is stillness. Not the manufactured stillness of a classroom or a waiting room, but the earned kind — the kind that comes from understanding that the fish can feel your weight shift, that the water carries sound, that everything alive beneath the surface knows when you're fidgeting and makes its decision accordingly. A child who grows up on the bayous around Dulac, Louisiana learns this before they learn their multiplication tables. They learn that patience isn't a virtue. It's a technique.

These are the children in poems about children written from this place — kids who wake before sunrise because that's when the boat leaves, who know how to coil a rope and read a cloud and sit quietly in the bow for three hours without being told twice. They know where the channel shallows. They know what that particular color of water means. They know it the way you know your own name — not as knowledge you hold but as knowledge that holds you. There's no innocence-as-abstraction in these poems. The childhood in them is specific and competent and grounded, and it reaches something true precisely because it never reaches for it. You can read the poem “Pray” and understand immediately: this is not a poem about childhood in general. It is a poem about a particular morning, a particular child, a particular act of faith that requires no church, only water.

What makes poems about raising kids reach something real is the same thing that makes the best teaching reach something real: it has to be specific. A poem about childhood in general is a poem about nothing. A poem about a particular kid in a particular boat on a particular stretch of marsh water in September — that poem will find its reader a thousand miles from the Gulf and make them think of their own particular child in their own particular morning. That specificity is Mitchell Parfait's gift. He writes from a place so particular that wherever you are, you recognize it as the place you came from.

The Lesson That Has No Lesson Plan

There is a kind of teaching that happens without announcement. No lesson plan, no learning objectives — just a man standing beside a child on a dock, holding a rod the way you hold a rod, waiting for the child to figure out the cast through the muscle of repetition. The cast that took forty tries. The first forty casts you watch go wrong in small ways: the line piling up on the water, the lure landing six feet to the left, the timing off by a fraction of a second because a fraction of a second is exactly what separates a cast that works from one that doesn't. The forty-first cast lands right. The child knows before you tell them. You can see it in the way they hold the rod after — like they own it now.

This is the world of parenting poetry written from Dulac. Mitchell Parfait grew up watching this kind of teaching — not the soft-focus instruction of someone who has read books about fatherhood, but the actual thing: the knot that finally held after the third time you showed them how to tie it, the moment when they baited the hook themselves and you stepped back because there was nothing left to do. The father in these poems about a father and his child teaches by doing and by waiting. He doesn't explain what patience is. He demonstrates it, day after day, on the water, until the child absorbs it the same way they absorbed everything else they know — through proximity to someone who already knows. If you've read the poems about fathers in this collection, you already know the man I'm describing. The one who doesn't say much. The one who shows up before dawn. These poems about children are the view from the other side of that same relationship — what it looks like when you are the child on the dock, learning.

What You Notice When They Aren't Looking

There comes a moment in every parent's life when they realize the child doesn't need their hand anymore. Not because something changed suddenly, but because something changed gradually, so gradually that you missed it while it was happening. You were watching them fish. You were watching them bait the hook. You were watching their hands doing the thing they'd watched your hands do a hundred times. And at some point the hands stopped being imitations of your hands and became their own hands, with their own competence, and you were no longer teaching — you were just there, watching.

These are the moments that the best poems about watching your child grow try to hold onto. Not the milestones — first step, first word, first day of school. Those are markers everyone notices. The harder thing to catch is the moment between the markers, the quiet Tuesday when you suddenly see who they're becoming and realize the becoming has been happening all along, while you were looking at something else. The water taught them. The boat taught them. You were the reason they were there to be taught, and that is its own kind of work. The grandfather stands further back than the father — poems about grandfathers in this collection carry that same quiet watching, one generation removed, the pride more patient because it has already done the work of waiting once before.

Poetry about children and family that earns its tenderness doesn't sentimentalize. It observes. The child wading into the shallows with no fear — the parent watching from the bank, feeling something that has no name. That nameless feeling is what poetry is for. Not to name it, but to hold it long enough that you know you're not the only one who has felt it. Mitchell Parfait writes those moments from the Gulf Coast, where the water does the teaching and the fathers stand nearby and the children wade forward without looking back, as children do.

A Book for Fathers and the Children Who Love Them

Father's Day is June 15. If you are looking for the right thing to give a father who has spent years on the water with his kids — who handed a daughter a rod for the first time and watched her figure out the cast, who taught a son to read the tide and then stepped back when the tide no longer needed explaining — this is that gift. DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait is not a greeting card. It is a book of forty-five poems that sounds like the Gulf Coast, that carries the weight of real fatherhood and real childhood and the water that runs through both. The Father's Day poetry gift that nobody else will think of, because most people are reaching for something generic and this is anything but.

It is also the right gift from a child who wants to give their parent a poem that actually sounds like them. Not a poem that could have been written for anyone — a poem from the specific world their father came from, or the world they built together on the water. The tenderness in this collection is real, but it's earned. It doesn't arrive decorated. It arrives the way the best things on the Gulf Coast arrive: direct, unannounced, with salt water on its hands.

The paperback is $12.99. The Kindle edition is $3.99. You can read it in a single afternoon — a short book by design, because good poems don't need to be long. What they need is to be true, and these are. Order it for the father who has watched his children grow up near the water and felt, more than once, that nameless thing you feel when you realize they can do it on their own now. Give him the poem that says it back to him. Give him this.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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