Poems About Myrtle Grove, Louisiana

Myrtle Grove: The Name, the Levee Road, and the River Running Close

The name comes from the plant: the myrtle, a small flowering shrub that grows in the low, wet ground of coastal Louisiana and across the Gulf South wherever the water table is close to the surface and the soil stays damp through the summer. In French, the word for these plants and berries is les myrtilles, and it carries both the botanical origin and the history of a place-name given to this particular stretch of the west bank Plaquemines Parish levee road before the citrus groves arrived, before Highway 23 was paved, before most of what defines this community today had any name at all. The myrtles were here first. The name remembers that.

Myrtle Grove sits on Highway 23, the corridor that runs south from New Orleans along the west bank of the Mississippi River through the lower Plaquemines Parish communities, past Belle Chasse and Jesuit Bend and down through the delta towns to Port Sulphur and beyond. It is an unincorporated community, which means no incorporated limits, no city hall, no downtown. What there is instead is the road, the levee, and the river running close. On high water the river sits at eye level with the fields on the other side of the levee. You can stand on the levee at Myrtle Grove and feel the weight of the Mississippi pressing against the earthwork a few feet away.

To live in Myrtle Grove is to live between the river and the Gulf in a way that is not metaphor but physical fact. The river runs at one shoulder, always close, always higher than the ground in most seasons. The Gulf works up from the other direction through the marsh and the back bays, through the intracoastal and the tidal channels, bringing the salt air and the shrimp and the storms that build over open water before they arrive on the coast. The strip of ground between those two forces is where the community is. It has always been narrow. The people who live here have always known it.

Life in Myrtle Grove: Citrus Groves, Shrimping Families, and the Uneven Return After Katrina

The citrus groves are the thing that distinguishes this stretch of the west bank from the communities to the south. Plaquemines Parish was once the citrus capital of Louisiana, and the orange groves that ran along the levee road through Myrtle Grove and the surrounding communities were part of an agricultural tradition that stretched back generations. The trees grew in the alluvial soil deposited by the river, heavy and rich, the kind of ground that does not need much persuading to produce. Families here knew both the water and the land, working the shrimp and oyster grounds through the seasons and tending the citrus between harvests.

The levee road is the gathering spine of the community. In a place with no downtown and no incorporated center, the road and the levee itself serve the social functions that a town square might serve elsewhere. Neighbors pass each other on the road. Children grow up knowing the rhythm of the river as it rises and falls through the year, learning to read the water before they learn much else. The Highway 23 corridor is not just a transportation route here. It is the lifeline that connects Myrtle Grove to the jobs, the schools, the services, and the rest of the parish. Without it there is no community, only ground.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005 and the west bank of Plaquemines Parish took damage that the national coverage rarely described in detail. The surge that came through the lower Plaquemines corridor overtoped the levees in multiple locations and put water into communities that had believed themselves protected. Myrtle Grove sustained significant damage. The citrus groves that had defined this stretch of the levee road were hit by saltwater intrusion that killed trees that had stood for decades. Homes flooded. Families evacuated and some did not come back.

The return was partial and uneven, as it was across the lower Plaquemines Parish west bank. Some families came back quickly, others slowly, others not at all. The groves that survived required years of work to recover, and some sections of what had been citrus land did not produce again at the same scale. The community that returned was smaller than the one that left, and the infrastructure, the schools and businesses and services that a community needs, came back unevenly. What stayed, and what stayed most stubbornly, were the families who came back because this is where they are from. That is not a complicated reason. It is the only reason that matters in a place like Myrtle Grove, where the ground has always asked something of the people on it.

Featured Poem: Myrtle Grove

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the levee road running close to the river, the citrus groves between the levee and the marsh, the light in September when the oranges are still small and the heat has not yet broken. The poem opens on something physical and stays there, moving through the history of this place without leaving the ground beneath it. It closes on the two lines that hold the oldest truth of Myrtle Grove.

The poem closes on the two lines that carry the whole weight of this place: The myrtles grew here before the groves did. / Something in the name knew this place would hold. The name came before the agricultural identity that most people associate with Myrtle Grove. The myrtles preceded the orange trees, preceded the shrimp boats, preceded the levee road itself. Something in that original naming, before anyone knew what this place would become or what it would survive, chose correctly. The ground held.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Gulf Coast Voice That Names the Unmentioned Places

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the relationship between working water and working land is as immediate as it is at Myrtle Grove. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through the communities of coastal Louisiana that define themselves by what they catch and grow on difficult ground, the bayou parishes, the lower Plaquemines Parish corridor, the Highway 23 communities that the national literary world has not often stopped to name. Myrtle Grove is exactly the kind of place this work is for.

The west bank Plaquemines Parish world that Dulac Poetry speaks to is one where the land and the water are not separate categories. The families of Myrtle Grove worked the shrimp grounds and the oyster reefs through the seasons, and they tended the citrus groves between harvests, and they watched the river from the levee road the way you watch something that is always present and always capable of changing everything. That double knowledge, of working water and working land in the same life, in the same hands, is what Parfait writes from and what makes his voice credible on this particular ground.

The Gulf Coast voice that shapes this work does not reach for significance. It finds the physical detail that holds the meaning and stays with it. The levee road running close to the river. The citrus trees between the levee and the marsh. The oranges in September when the heat has not yet broken. These are not symbols. They are the facts of the place, and the facts of the place are what a poem about Myrtle Grove needs to hold. Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same discipline is required, where the ground is too real and too difficult to treat as a backdrop for ideas that could have been written anywhere.

Dulac Poetry on Amazon is where this work is collected: poems of working water and working land along the Louisiana Gulf Coast, the bayou communities and the lower river corridor and the Highway 23 towns that have held their ground through storms and erosion and the long pressure of living between the river and the Gulf, written by a poet from Dulac, Louisiana who knows what that holding costs and what it means.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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If Myrtle Grove holds you: the citrus groves along the west bank levee road, the river running high and close, the name that remembered the myrtles before the orange trees came, the community that took the Katrina surge and came back because this is where they are from. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same commitment to staying in the difficult place holds: the ground defines the life, the name matters, and the people who come back after the water know what the place is worth.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the west bank levee road, the citrus groves of Plaquemines Parish, and the Gulf South communities that hold their names through everything.

Find more poems about the west bank Plaquemines Parish corridor at Triumph, Buras, Empire, Port Sulphur, and Venice. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Myrtle Grove, Louisiana, in Plaquemines Parish on the west bank of the Mississippi River along Highway 23, a small unincorporated community between Belle Chasse and Port Sulphur where the citrus groves, the levee road, and the river define everything. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.