Poems About Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana

The End of the Road South of Dulac

Drive south from Dulac and the road eventually commits itself to Isle de Jean Charles Road — a narrow strip of asphalt running out into what used to be land and is now mostly Gulf. The island that once stretched 22,000 acres in Terrebonne Parish, south of Montegut and Pointe-aux-Chêne, has lost 98% of its land mass since 1955. What remains is roughly 320 acres, and even that understates the reality: the land on both sides of the road is gone, or nearly gone, and what you are driving through is less an island than a levee road above the waterline, the Gulf of Mexico visible on both sides when the tide is wrong.

The people who live there — the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians — have been watching this happen for decades. In 2016, they became the first American community to receive a federal grant specifically for climate relocation: $48 million for the Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Project, the first managed retreat in US history. They are the first community in the United States officially displaced by climate change.

Mitchell Parfait grew up in Dulac — one community north on Bayou Grand Caillou, Terrebonne Parish. He knows Isle de Jean Charles Road by name and by the feel of it under his tires. He knows the families. This is not abstract climate data. This is the place where the land that made him is going. That is the world at the heart of DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait.

Life on Isle de Jean Charles

Isle de Jean Charles Road floods on a bad tide — some days the only way in or out is by boat. The asphalt sits barely above the water on both sides, and in storm season it is underwater entirely for days at a stretch. The houses that still stand do so on stilts, elevated above what used to be yard and is now sometimes open Gulf. It is one of the most vulnerable pieces of inhabited land in the United States.

The land loss has several causes, but the oil industry built the foundation of it. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, energy companies dredged canals through the Terrebonne marsh for pipeline access. Saltwater came in through those canals, killed the marsh grass, and the land dissolved — first slowly, then all at once. Subsidence does the rest: south Louisiana sinks one to two inches per year in places, and Isle de Jean Charles sits among the worst. Sea level rise adds to it. The island is the sum of all these forces, and the people living on it have been watching the calculation run the wrong way their whole lives.

La terre here is not a fixed thing. The community's roots go back to the 1830s, when Native Americans retreated to the island to avoid Indian Removal Act enforcement — this place was refuge precisely because it was hard to reach, surrounded by marsh, easy to miss on a map. Les ancêtres built here because here was what was left. The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tradition — the Mardi Gras Indian gatherings, the Catholic church, the Cajun French still spoken by elders — grew from that refuge into a full community: a few dozen families, everyone knowing everyone's grandfather by name.

Chief Albert Naquin has spoken for the community's right to stay. The tension is real and unresolved: the $48 million federal grant says move, and the impulse of a people who survived removal once says we are from here, this is who we are, this is where our dead are buried. Mitchell Parfait knows this tension from Dulac — how the water takes land slowly, over years, a marsh edge here, a yard there, until one day you look and the thing you were watching disappear is gone.

Featured Poem: What the Water Takes

In Mitchell Parfait's voice — a man driving Isle de Jean Charles Road from Montegut, the water on both sides, not frightening, just present. An old man on the porch of a house on stilts that wasn't on stilts ten years ago. A pelican landing on a piling that used to be someone's fence post. The land doesn't leave all at once. It leaves the way a person leaves — slowly, then you notice one day they're gone.

The full poem — 38 lines — follows the man through the island. An old man on the porch of a house on stilts that wasn't on stilts ten years ago. A pelican landing on a piling that used to be someone's fence post. L'île arrives once, in the middle, not as drama but as fact — the island, named once, because naming it once is enough. Les ancêtres arrives near the end: the people who hid here from the removal, who built here because here was all that was left. The land doesn't leave all at once. It leaves the way a person leaves — slowly, then you notice one day they're gone. He turns the truck around at the road's end. The water is on both sides now. He drives back north toward Dulac. The island is still there. For now. DULAC POETRY holds that kind of attention — the working-water knowledge that knows what it is watching.

Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana's Literary Landscape

Isle de Jean Charles is the most-written-about climate story in Louisiana. ProPublica, The New York Times, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine — every major outlet has sent a reporter down Isle de Jean Charles Road to file the story of the sinking island. When people search for what “climate relocation” means in human terms, they find this island, this community, this road. The SEO footprint is enormous; the human story is larger still.

Mike Tidwell's Bayou Farewell (2003) named Isle de Jean Charles explicitly when Tidwell canoed through the Louisiana coast and documented the disappearing land — the first widely-read account to trace the oil canals and the subsidence together as a system of loss. Jesmyn Ward writes from just across the Mississippi border, from DeLisle — the Gulf Coast literature of staying and losing, of Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones, the same emotional territory where community is inseparable from the land beneath it. The Katrina literature cluster — Lolis Eric Elie, Gary Rivlin — frames the coast as wound, the Gulf as something that takes.

Mitchell Parfait is not a journalist filing a story from the road. He is not a novelist imagining the geography from the outside. He grew up in Dulac — the next community north — and the water he writes about is the same water taking the island. That is the distinction DULAC POETRY carries: not reportage, not elegy from a safe distance, but the knowledge of someone who knows which families live on the road and what they are holding onto.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait is poetry written from inside this world — the bayou, the Gulf, the land and the water and the people who live where they meet. Not written about the coast from a safe distance, but from Dulac, Louisiana, one community north of the road that ends at open water. Available now on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99). 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 Isle de Jean Charles Louisiana — or for Gulf South poetry about Terrebonne Parish, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw community, climate relocation in Louisiana, the sinking island, managed retreat, coastal erosion, and the people who stay — 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 — the next community north on Bayou Grand Caillou, one road over from the road that ends in open water.

Read alongside poems about Leeville, 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 — Isle de Jean Charles Louisiana poetry on Amazon. Get Your Copy on Amazon | Buy the Book | Read Dulac Poetry