Poems About Empire, Louisiana
Original poetry about Empire, Louisiana by Mitchell Parfait : a small fishing community on the west bank of Plaquemines Parish, where Highway 23 runs south past Empire Lock toward Venice and the name holds more ambition than the shrimp boats ever asked for.
By Mitchell Parfait · Dulac, Louisiana · October 24, 2025 · 7 min read · Empire & Plaquemines Parish
The name sits on the map like a declaration nobody made. Empire. A word for conquest, for dominion, for a scale of power that the lower delta has never pretended to hold. The shrimp boats went out anyway. The oyster luggers worked the bays. Empire Lock opened and closed for the fishing fleet the way it always has, indifferent to the name above the waterline.
Empire, Louisiana: The Imperial Name on the West Bank Fishing Community
Empire sits on the west bank of Plaquemines Parish, south of Port Sulphur on Highway 23. It is not a large town. It has never been a large town. The name is an irony that the lower delta carries with a straight face: Empire, Louisiana, a community of shrimpers and oystermen and commercial fishermen on the lower Mississippi, bearing a word that belongs to a different scale of history entirely.
The Plaquemines Parish west bank is full of names like this. The gap between the name and the place is part of the geography here. Empire was named with some aspiration, some sense that this was the beginning of something larger. What it became was a fishing community on the levee road, the kind of place where a man knows every other boat captain by name and the shrimping calendar is as fixed as any official calendar, and more reliable.
Empire Lock, also called the Empire Waterway Lock, is the real mark that distinguishes this community on any navigation chart. The lock connects the Mississippi River to the Gulf through a controlled waterway passage. It is an important navigation feature for the local fishing fleet: a practical piece of engineering that lets the boats move between the river and the bays without fighting the full force of the Mississippi current. The lock is what Empire actually built. It is more useful than any imperial name.
Life in Empire: Shrimping, Empire Lock, Katrina, and the West Bank Fishing Community
The economy of Empire has always been the water. Shrimping and oystering are the industries here, the same industries that run through every community on the lower west bank of Plaquemines Parish. Les crevettiers, the shrimp trawlers, go out before the sun comes up, running south past the lock toward the bays and offshore grounds where the Gulf shrimp hold. The oyster luggers work the leases in the lower bays, beds that the delta has produced for as long as anyone in these families can remember. Commercial fishing of every kind runs alongside the shrimping and oystering: finfish, crab, the various catches that the lower delta produces in abundance for those who know where to look and when the season is right.
Empire Lock is the operational center of the community's relationship with the water. The lock system allows vessels to pass between the Mississippi River and the network of waterways that connect to the Gulf of Mexico. For the fishing fleet, this is not an abstract piece of infrastructure. It is the hinge on which the whole working day turns. A boat that needs to move from the river side to the bay side passes through the lock. The lockmaster knows the captains. The captains know the lockmaster's schedule. It is a small community running on mutual knowledge, the way the whole lower delta operates.
Highway 23 runs through Empire on its way south toward Venice. It is the only road. Every supply truck, every school bus, every family heading north to Port Sulphur or Belle Chasse or New Orleans takes Highway 23. The community is structured around the road and the waterway, both of them running roughly parallel on the west bank until the land gives out entirely below Venice. Empire is one of the communities Highway 23 passes through on the way to the end of navigable Louisiana.
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the lower Plaquemines Parish west bank with devastating force. The storm surge overtopped the levees and the flooding was severe. Empire was heavily damaged. Homes and businesses were destroyed. Families who had lived here for generations evacuated and many did not return. The community that existed before Katrina has not fully come back. The population is smaller. Some of the houses that were destroyed were never rebuilt. The church opened again. The boats went back in the water. Empire Lock resumed operation. But the partial recovery is visible in every empty lot and every rebuilt house that stands alongside a vacant one.
What remained after the storm is the same thing that was here before it: the water, the fishing knowledge, the community of people who chose to come back to a place that costs something to live in. The west bank Plaquemines Parish character is about that choice, repeated generation after generation in the face of every reason to leave.
Featured Poem: Empire
In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the name's aspirational weight against the daily reality of the boats and the lock and the water that defines every family here. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same working-water knowledge is lived rather than visited. The poem holds the irony without making a joke of it. Empire is the name. The shrimp boats are the truth.
Empire
The boats leave before the light does.
You can hear them at the lock,
the engines low and patient,
waiting for the water to level,
for the gates to open and let them through
to the bay side, to the shrimping grounds
where the season is everything
and the name of the town means nothing.
Empire Lock opens in the dark.
The lockmaster knows the schedule
and the captains know the lockmaster.
This is how a small place works:
mutual knowledge, the handshake of familiarity,
the understanding that everyone here
depends on the same water
moving in the same direction.
Highway 23 runs through
on its way to somewhere else.
Venice is south. Port Sulphur is north.
Empire is where you are
when neither matters yet,
when the oyster lugger is still
tied at the dock
and the morning has not decided
what it will cost you.
The storm came in 2005
and took what the levees could not hold.
Some people came back.
Some did not. The ones who returned
put the boats back in the water
and the lock opened again for them,
the same as always.
The name was someone's idea of greatness.
The shrimp boats made it mean something else.
The poem closes on two lines that hold the full weight of the place: The name was someone's idea of greatness. The shrimp boats made it mean something else. Empire is what someone decided to call this community. What the place actually became, what it means to everyone who has ever worked the water here, was built by the fishing families and the boats and the lock and the early mornings before the light. The name is borrowed from someone else's ambition. The shrimp boats are real.
Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Gulf Coast Voice of the Working-Water South
Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community where the knowledge of working on water is not a poetic theme but a daily fact passed between generations. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through the small communities of coastal Louisiana: the bayou parishes, the river corridor of Plaquemines, the working-water towns that most American poetry has never thought to name. Empire fits into that work because it carries the particular irony of the west bank Plaquemines Parish place names: the scale of the name against the scale of the actual community, the aspiration built into the map label against the reality of the shrimping families and the oystermen who have always been here.
The Gulf Coast themes of Dulac Poetry are endurance, working water, faith, and the willingness to remain in places that cost something to live in. Empire fits that pattern. The community was severely damaged by Katrina and has only partially recovered. The families who came back made a choice that those themes understand: the water is here, the knowledge is here, the boats are here. The name on the map is borrowed from someone else's ambition. The life built here belongs to the people who built it.
Places outlast their names. Empire, Louisiana, will outlast the word empire the same way the shrimp boats outlasted every scheme for what this delta could be. Mitchell Parfait's poetry is for readers who know what it means to work on the water and stay in a place that keeps asking you whether you will. Dulac Poetry on Amazon collects that world in full, written from inside the communities that hard weather and hard history shaped, by a poet from Dulac, Louisiana, who understands what it means to call this particular edge home.
From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.
DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon
Discover Dulac Poetry on Amazon
If Empire holds you: the imperial name on the west bank fishing community, Empire Lock opening before dawn for the shrimp trawlers heading out to the bays, Highway 23 running through on its way south to Venice, the Katrina storm surge that took most of what was here and the partial return of the families who chose to come back. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY holds that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same arithmetic of staying and losing and staying anyway has been lived for generations.
DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Poetry from the shrimp boats, Empire Lock, and the west bank communities of the lower Plaquemines Parish delta.
Find more poems about the west bank Plaquemines Parish corridor at Port Sulphur, Venice, Boothville, Ironton, and Happy Jack. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.
Poems from Empire, Louisiana, a west bank Plaquemines Parish fishing community on Highway 23, where Empire Lock serves the shrimp trawlers and the name on the map belongs to a scale of history this town never needed. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.
Poetry From the West Bank Fishing Communities of Plaquemines
The imperial name on the levee road. Empire Lock opening before dawn. The shrimp trawlers moving through to the bay side, where the name means nothing and the season means everything.
Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana: bayou country, Gulf South, the inherited knowledge of water and what it costs to live and work beside it. His book DULAC POETRY is available now on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99).
Written from the Louisiana Gulf Coast waterways by Mitchell Parfait.