Poems About Cocodrie, Louisiana

The Last Road South: Cocodrie, Louisiana

Drive south out of Houma on Highway 24 and watch what happens to the world. The city falls behind and the land flattens out and the marsh comes in on both sides — first in glimpses behind the treelines, then open and wide and flat to the horizon in every direction, the sky getting bigger the further south you go, the road narrowing as if it knows where it is going and isn't sure it should get there. Past Dulac, past Coteau, the pavement thins and the camps appear on both sides on their stilts and you can smell the Gulf before you see it — salt air and diesel and something alive in the marsh that you cannot name but know.

Then the road ends. Not gradually — it ends. The marina. The charter boats tied at the dock, their outriggers folded in, wakes long gone flat because the boats have been out since before dawn. Fishing camps on stilts crowding both banks. The Gulf of Mexico beginning where the land stops. This is Cocodrie — cocodrille in old French, alligator, and in the black drainage ditches running alongside the road you understand the naming entirely. LUMCON sits on the point, its instruments recording what everyone here has already noticed: the marsh is leaving. The land that made this place is going. Cocodrie is the last community before there is no more Louisiana.

Life in Cocodrie

Cocodrie is not a town in the ordinary sense. There is no grocery store at the end of Highway 24, no gas station, no traffic light. What there is: the marina, the charter docks, the camps on stilts, and the water. The economy here has always been fishing — offshore fishing, specifically, the kind that runs before dawn in the dark and comes back in the afternoon with coolers full of tuna and amberjack from the rigs, or speckled trout from the back bays, or les rédores — the redfish working the grass lines where the marsh still holds. Charter captains who have been running the same passes for three generations, who know every reef and every rig platform and every cut through the marsh by feel as much as by GPS. Mais, the boats leave before most people wake up. By the time you reach the marina at sunrise, cher, the serious work is already miles out.

The camp culture is as old as the fishing. Families who built their first camp here in the 1950s when le bayou was still defined by solid marsh edges on both sides — those same families still hold the same camps, rebuilt higher after Katrina, higher again after Ike and Gustav, higher still after Ida. Each hurricane teaches the same lesson and the camps accept it. The stilts go up another two feet. The dock gets replaced. The family comes back. This is what le bout du chemin means here — the end of the road is not surrender. It is the decision to stay at the end, to keep coming back to the place the road gives out.

The coastal land loss is visible from the dock if you know what you are looking at. The shallow marks on the nautical charts where channels used to have defined edges — now open water, the edges dissolved. Camp roads that led inland twenty years ago now stop halfway and disappear into the Gulf. The marsh is not retreating uniformly; it is vanishing in patches and pockets, the way something rots from the inside out. Since 1930, the surrounding Terrebonne marsh has lost enormous acreage — and the rate is not slowing down. LUMCON scientists arrive in summer to measure what the charter captains here have been watching for decades: la côte is going. The fishermen watch them set up their instruments and nod and go out the next morning anyway, because the fish are still there even when the land is not.

Featured Poem: The End of Highway 24

In Mitchell Parfait's voice — a man who has driven this road before, who knows exactly where it stops, who parks at the marina and cuts the engine and listens. The charter boats are already gone. A brown pelican on the dock piling, patient, unconcerned. The LUMCON instruments on the point, recording. The land is leaving. He has known this since he was a boy in Dulac, one estuary north.

The poem holds its stillness the way the marina holds it after the charter boats have gone — not empty, exactly, but waiting. The pelican is the poem's hinge: it sits, it drops, it rises. No drama. The work continues. That is the Cocodrie that DULAC POETRY carries — the working-water knowledge that knows what it is watching without needing to announce it.

Cocodrie in Louisiana's Literary and Cultural Landscape

Cocodrie sits at the intersection of two of the most-written-about ongoing narratives in the American South. The first is the offshore fishing tradition of the Gulf South — the charter boat economy, the speckled trout and redfish and offshore tuna that draw anglers from across the country to what captains here call the best fishing water in the world. The second is the accelerating land loss story that ProPublica, the Times-Picayune/Advocate, and national environmental journalists keep returning to: the Louisiana coast is disappearing, and Cocodrie is where you can stand at the end of the road and watch it happen. LUMCON has been cited in hundreds of scientific papers on coastal erosion, sea level rise, and wetland loss. The place name itself — French for alligator, from cocodrille, carried forward from the French colonial naming of this coast — is a reminder that this land was always named for what lived in it, not for what might be built on it.

Mike Tidwell's Bayou Farewell (2003) is the definitive narrative account of this coastline — the book that traced the oil canals and the subsidence and the saltwater intrusion together as a single system of loss, and named Cocodrie and the surrounding Terrebonne marsh as ground zero of that system. Mitchell Parfait is not a journalist who arrived by plane to file the land loss story. He grew up in Dulac — one community north on Bayou Grand Caillou, one estuary north of Cocodrie — and the water he writes about is the same water the LUMCON instruments are measuring. That is the distinction DULAC POETRY carries: inside knowledge, every season, every tide.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

Order the Paperback →Get the Kindle ($3.99) →

Read Dulac Poetry

Mitchell Parfait grew up in Dulac, Louisiana — one estuary north of Cocodrie. His poetry carries the smell of this water in every line. Order DULAC POETRY on Amazon — available in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99). Written from inside the working-water world, by a man who knows where the road ends because he has been to the end of it. The book is on Amazon now.

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 Cocodrie Louisiana — or for Gulf South poetry about Terrebonne Parish, offshore fishing, speckled trout, redfish, LUMCON, coastal erosion, Highway 24, and the community at the end of the road — 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 — one estuary north, the same marsh, the same tide.

Read alongside poems about Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana and poems about Dulac, Louisiana to follow Mitchell Parfait's Terrebonne Parish from home to the water's edge. Then read about DULAC POETRY on the book page, or learn about Mitchell Parfait on the author page.

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