Poems About Donaldsonville, Louisiana

Donaldsonville, Louisiana: Where the Bayou Begins

Donaldsonville sits at one of the great water decisions in Louisiana geography. It is the seat of Ascension Parish, a Mississippi River town founded in 1806, one of the oldest European settlements in the state, perched at the exact point where Bayou Lafourche diverges from the main channel and begins its long pull south toward the Gulf. The French called these branching distributary passages les passes, the places where the water divides and finds new ground, and Donaldsonville is where one of the most consequential of those separations happens: the moment the bayou claims its own course and starts the 106-mile journey to Leeville and Grand Isle.

The Sunshine Bridge arches over the river here, connecting the two banks of the Mississippi in the stretch of sugar country above New Orleans. The town has railroad history running through it, the old line that connected the River Road plantations to the commerce of the interior. The antebellum town square is one of Louisiana's oldest, laid out in the early years of the nineteenth century when Donaldsonville briefly served as the state capital. German and Acadian settlers came in successive waves, layering their languages and foodways and faiths onto the French Creole foundation already in place, and the town that resulted is the kind of distinctly Louisiana place that only accumulated history can build.

Mitchell Parfait's Dulac Poetry is a book rooted in Louisiana water and the people who live alongside it. Parfait writes from Dulac, at the bayou's southern end where it meets the Gulf, and his poems carry the knowledge of a man who understands what water does when it is given a direction and a reason to move. Donaldsonville is where that movement begins.

Life in Donaldsonville: Sugar Country, the Fort on the Point, and the Head of Bayou Lafourche

Bayou Lafourche leaves the Mississippi at Donaldsonville. This is its head: the point of origin, the place the bayou was born when the river decided to shed a tributary and send it south. The bayou runs 106 miles from this point to the Gulf, passing through Thibodaux and Larose and Cut Off and Galliano and Golden Meadow and Leeville before it finally opens into the coastal marshes above Grand Isle. Every community along that corridor draws its identity from this water, and the water started here, at the bend in the Mississippi where Donaldsonville stands.

Ascension Parish is sugar country. The River Road plantations run along both banks of the Mississippi above and below town, and the sugar cane fields still spread out from the river levee in the flat alluvial land that the river built over centuries. The processing plants still run in harvest season, grinding the cane that has been grown here since the antebellum period, when this stretch of the river was among the wealthiest agricultural land in the country. The history of that wealth is complicated and scarred, and the town holds it all: the plantation houses, the cane fields, the layered records of the people who worked the land under every condition Louisiana history has offered.

The town square preserves the site of Fort Butler, the Union fort built on the point where the bayou meets the river during the Civil War occupation. In 1863, Confederate forces staged a night assault on the fort, one of the war's few instances of a Black Union garrison successfully repelling a Confederate attack. The fort stood at the exact geographic point that made Donaldsonville strategically significant: the mouth of the bayou, the place where controlling the water meant controlling the territory. The people who built this town and fought over it came from everywhere Louisiana drew its people: Acadian, German, Spanish, African American, French Creole, each community laying down a layer that the next generation inherited and built on. The fishing and shrimping communities that the bayou connects all the way to the Gulf trace their lines of supply and kinship back to this point. The river is the axis. The bayou is the beginning of everything south.

Featured Poem: Donaldsonville

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the river making its decision at the bend, the bayou pulling south toward the Gulf, the sugar cane fields along the road, the old town square in morning light, the fort on the point where the water divides, and the families who have worked this land for generations. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the bayou that starts at Donaldsonville finally reaches the sea.

The poem opens on the river's decision: the bend at Donaldsonville where the current sheds a tributary and sends it south without ceremony. The bayou takes the instruction and moves through the sugar country, through the towns the water made. The cane fields in October, the processing plant smoke, the town square in morning light. The fort on the point where the bayou meets the river, and the night the garrison held what it had to hold. The layered settlement history: Acadian, German, Spanish, African American, French Creole. And the close that names the book's geography directly: the bayou started here and ran all the way south to the sea, and Dulac is at the other end.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Full Length of Bayou Lafourche

Mitchell Parfait grew up at the other end of Bayou Lafourche. In Dulac, Louisiana, the bayou meets the Gulf: the land runs out, the marsh opens into open water, and the communities that have lived along this corridor since before Louisiana was a state reach their southern limit. His book Dulac Poetry collects the voices of the fishermen and craftsmen and people of faith who live at the water's edge: people who know the bayou not as a scenic feature but as the road, the supply line, the source of their livelihood and their identity.

Donaldsonville is where that water starts its journey south. Everything the bayou corridor produces, from the Acadian foodways to the shrimping fleets to the communities that rebuilt after every storm, begins at the bend in the river where the bayou pulls away from the Mississippi and heads for the Gulf. The book is what that journey produces: 106 miles of water and the people who have lived alongside it from the beginning to the end. Dulac Poetry is available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99).

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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If Donaldsonville holds you: the river making its decision at the bend, the bayou pulling south through 106 miles of sugar country and bayou towns, the fort on the point where the water divides, the layered settlement history of Ascension Parish, and the close of the poem that names the book's full geography in three lines. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the bayou that starts at Donaldsonville finally reaches the sea.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the head of Bayou Lafourche to the Gulf Coast, from the river town where it all begins to the bayou community at the other end.

Find more poems about Louisiana's waterways at Southwest Pass, South Pass, Head of Passes, Pass a Loutre, and Port Eads. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Donaldsonville, Louisiana, the historic river town where Bayou Lafourche begins its journey south to the Gulf. The sugar cane corridor of Ascension Parish. The Fort Butler site on the point where the bayou meets the Mississippi. The layered settlement history of one of Louisiana's oldest towns. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.