Poems About Nairn, Louisiana

Nairn, Louisiana: Highway 39, the East Bank, and a Scottish Name in a French Catholic Corridor

South of Pointe-a-la-Hache on Highway 39, the east bank of Plaquemines Parish runs close between the river levee on one side and the marsh on the other, the strip of habitable ground narrowing as you move south. Nairn sits in this stretch, a small unincorporated community that most maps do not show in any detail and that most travelers on Highway 39 pass without knowing the name. The land measurement system here is still visible in the old plat lines: les arpents, the long lots running perpendicular from the levee back into the wetlands, strips of ground assigned to the first French settlers and still recognizable in the way property boundaries run in lower Plaquemines Parish. The land holds the French system even where the names have drifted from it.

Nairn is the most conspicuous of those drifted names. Nairn is a town in northern Scotland, a port on the Moray Firth in the Scottish Highlands, cold and windswept and as distant from a Louisiana bayou corridor as a place can be. How the name arrived on the east bank of Plaquemines Parish is not entirely clear. What is clear is the contrast: Nairn, Louisiana, sits at the southern end of one of the most thoroughly French Catholic stretches of the American South, a corridor where the place names run to Pointe-a-la-Hache and Braithwaite and Belle Chasse, where the cultural inheritance is Acadian and Creole and deeply rooted in the river and the marsh. A Scottish name here is a disruption. Over time it became something else: not Scottish, not a reference to anything cold, but a name belonging to this specific narrow strip of ground beside the Mississippi, made local by the families who stayed and worked it.

The river does not show itself at Nairn. The levee stands between Highway 39 and the water, a grass-covered earthen wall that hides the Mississippi completely from the road. You know the river is there because the levee tells you. You know it is high when you can hear the current moving on the other side of the bank, the sound carrying over the levee top on a still morning, the whole enormous weight of the upper river pressing through this narrow corridor toward the Gulf. The east bank families have always lived with that awareness: the river present and invisible, its moods communicated through sound and through the height of the water gauge at the landing.

A Scottish name on French bayou ground. The contrast is not incidental. It is the essential fact of Nairn.

Life in Nairn: Shrimping and Oystering, the Levee Road, and the East Bank After Katrina

The working life of Nairn has always been organized around the water. Shrimping and oystering families have worked this stretch of the east bank for generations, the boats going out through the bayous and channels that drain the marsh east of Highway 39, the oystermen knowing the reef beds and the tidal patterns the way the older French Catholic families knew the land measurements: by inheritance, by practice, by a knowledge that does not require a map because the map is already in the body. The levee road is the community spine, Highway 39 connecting Nairn to Pointe-a-la-Hache to the north and to the communities below. You do not arrive at Nairn except by this road.

The strip of ground between the river levee and the marsh is narrow here. There is not much flat land between the raised earthen bank on the west and the wet ground that begins a few hundred yards to the east, where the arpents of the old French land divisions run out into wetland. The community occupies this ribbon of higher ground the way all east bank Plaquemines communities do: close to the levee, close to the road, aware of the water on both sides. In a flooding event, there is not far to go.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. The east bank of Plaquemines Parish below Pointe-a-la-Hache took catastrophic damage. At Nairn, the levee was overtopped and the floodwaters reached depths that destroyed structures that had survived previous storms. Many families left after the water receded. The return was partial and slow. Some did not come back. The community that remained was smaller, quieter, and carried the marks of the storm in the lots where houses had stood and in the gaps in the working infrastructure along the levee road. Twenty years later, the east bank below Pointe-a-la-Hache remains a place of incomplete recovery: not abandoned, not restored, but persisting in the way that working-water communities on this corridor have always persisted, through the commitment of the families who decided the river and the marsh and the narrow strip of ground were worth staying for.

Featured Poem: Nairn

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the river hidden behind the levee on a still morning, the shrimping and oystering families on the east bank of Plaquemines Parish, the long lots of les arpents running back into the marsh from the road, and the Scottish name that arrived on this deep-south French Catholic corridor and became, through the staying of the people who worked it, entirely its own. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a Gulf Coast bayou community that understands what it means to carry a name through damage and to stay when staying is the harder choice.

The poem closes on the two lines that hold everything about this place: The name came from somewhere cold and far. The place made it mean something else. Nairn, Scotland is a port town on the Moray Firth, cold and northern and utterly unlike this strip of Louisiana ground. The name arrived here through some historical circumstance that the records do not fully explain, and over the generations of shrimping families and oystering families and the levee road and the storms, the name became local. Not Scottish, not a reference to anything beyond this corridor. The poem earns that close by moving through the hidden river, the long lots, the inherited knowledge of the water, and the aftermath of 2005. The place received the name and made it mean something else entirely.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Gulf South Voice That Finds Foreign Names in Familiar Ground

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the working life is built on the knowledge of tides and channels and the willingness to go out when the conditions allow. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through the landscapes of coastal Louisiana with the specificity of someone who understands the east bank not as a scenic drive but as a place where real families have built real lives in the narrow ribbon of ground between the levee and the marsh. Nairn belongs to this world.

One of the recurring concerns of Dulac Poetry is exactly this: places that carry names from somewhere else and make them local. The Gulf Coast is full of them, communities that received French names, Spanish names, English names, and in Nairn's case a Scottish name, and over the generations of working the water and weathering the storms turned those names into something irreplaceable and specific. The foreign origin does not diminish the place. It becomes part of the story the place tells about itself: how it received what came and made it mean something here.

The themes of Dulac Poetry are the themes of Nairn: working-water life, the levee road as the spine of the community, the endurance that is not heroism but simply the daily decision to stay, the beauty in the places that the national literary imagination has not bothered to name. The Gulf South voice does not perform grief or nostalgia. It finds the precise physical detail and stays there. The river hidden behind the levee. The long lots running back into the marsh. The oystermen with their inherited knowledge of the reef beds. These are not metaphors. They are the textures of a life lived on this specific stretch of east bank Louisiana for generations. The book 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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Explore Dulac Poetry on Amazon

If Nairn holds you: the river behind the levee on a still morning, the Scottish name in the deepest part of the French Catholic bayou corridor, les arpents still marking the old land divisions in the plat lines, the shrimping and oystering families who have worked this east bank ground through storms and partial returns and the quiet persistence that is not resilience as a performed quality but simply the fact of staying. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the bayou and the Gulf and the working-water life share the same understanding of what it means to receive a name, carry it through damage, and make it mean something of your own.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the east bank levee road, the hidden river, and the working communities of Plaquemines Parish and the Gulf South.

Find more poems about the east bank Plaquemines Parish corridor at Bohemia, Davant, Pointe-a-la-Hache, Myrtle Grove, and Triumph. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Nairn, Louisiana, east bank Plaquemines Parish, where Highway 39 runs south past the levee and the Scottish name sits on French bayou ground. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.