Poems About Naomi, Louisiana

Naomi, Louisiana: The Name, the Biblical Resonance, and the East Bank

There is a small unincorporated community on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish called Naomi. It sits along Highway 39 in the long strip of settlement between the river levee and the marsh, one of those east bank towns where the name appears on a sign and then the highway continues south and the land continues its slow argument with the water. Naomi is not a name that arrives without resonance. In the Book of Ruth, Naomi is the woman who loses everything, her husband and her sons, in a foreign country, and then turns back toward home. She renames herself Mara, which means bitter, because she says the Lord has dealt bitterly with her. And then, in the end, she is restored. The return is the story. The bitterness comes first and the return is what stays.

Someone named this community Naomi. Whether they were thinking of the biblical story or simply of a woman they knew, the name carries that freight now. On the east bank of Plaquemines Parish, where the river is just behind the levee and the marsh is pressing from the other side, a community that has known flooding and loss and the slow erasure of the Louisiana coast carries a name that is entirely about what it means to come back. That is not accidental. That is the kind of fact that poetry finds useful.

Life in Naomi: Citrus, Fishing, the Levee Road, and the Highway 39 Community

Naomi sits in the Highway 39 corridor of east bank Plaquemines Parish, the long reach of levee road that runs from the edge of the New Orleans metropolitan area south toward the tip of Louisiana. This is citrus country. The alluvial soil of the east bank parishes below the city has long supported satsuma orchards and navel orange groves, and the families who worked this land built their lives between the river and the marsh in a way that does not have a simple translation for anyone who has not done it. The levee is always present. The highway runs close to it and the houses sit on the land between the road and the tree line, and behind the levee wall the Mississippi is there, enormous and invisible, pressing against the concrete that keeps it from reclaiming everything it deposited over ten thousand years of flooding.

Fishing is the other work of this place. The waters of Plaquemines Parish produce redfish and speckled trout, shrimp and oysters from the bays and passes that open toward the Gulf. The east bank communities on Highway 39 are not far from those waters. Families here have always done both things: worked the land when the citrus was coming in and worked the water when the season called for it. That double knowledge, of soil and tide, of what the orchard needs and what the weather in the Gulf means for a boat trip south, is the inheritance of these communities.

The French phrase le retour, the return, sits at the center of the life that Naomi describes. These east bank towns on Highway 39 are places that people leave for school or work and then come back to, or try to come back to, or think about coming back to for the rest of their lives in whatever city absorbed them. The land here is specific. The light over the river levee at dusk is specific. The smell of citrus blossoms in February and the sound of the highway at night and the way the marsh grass moves when the wind comes off the water are all specific in a way that does not belong to anywhere else. That is what calls people back. That is what le retour means in a place like Naomi: not just a drive home, but a return to the only set of particulars that ever felt entirely true.

Featured Poem: Naomi

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the east bank levee road in Plaquemines Parish, the citrus orchards between the highway and the houses, the fishing boats south toward the passes, and the biblical name of a town that knows what return costs and chooses it anyway. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the bayou country teaches the same things the east bank teaches: that staying is a decision made every season, and coming back is the whole story when everything else has been taken.

The poem closes on the line that holds everything this place is: She came back. That is the whole story. The spare compression of that ending is intentional. The story of Naomi, biblical and geographic, does not need embellishment. The return is the fact. The return is what matters. Everything else, the bitterness, the loss, the long time away, is context for the one thing that the place and the name are both about: she came back. That is what DULAC POETRY does with this land.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Literary Landscape of the East Bank

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the water is always close and the question of staying is never fully settled. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through the small communities of coastal Louisiana, the east bank of Plaquemines Parish among them, finding in each place the same core questions: what does it cost to stay, what do you lose by leaving, and what is the texture of the land that calls you back when you have gone. Naomi, Louisiana belongs to that inquiry completely. The biblical name, the citrus orchards along Highway 39, the fishing boats running south before sunrise, the levee that separates the community from a river it cannot see, all of it is the material of a poetry that refuses to simplify what these communities are.

Dulac Poetry does not write about Plaquemines Parish from the outside looking in. Mitchell writes from the Gulf South, from the inherited knowledge of what the water means and what the land costs and what the name on a sign in a small east bank town says about the people who put it there and the people who stayed. Naomi, Louisiana is a community most poetry has never mentioned. That is what the Dulac Poetry project is for: to find the places that the literary world has passed through without stopping, and to stop, and to write down what was always there. The return is the poem. The poem is the return.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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If the east bank of Plaquemines Parish holds you: the Highway 39 corridor between New Orleans and the tip of Louisiana, the citrus orchards in alluvial soil, the fishing boats running south toward the passes before sunrise, the levee that keeps the river invisible from the road, and the small unincorporated communities with names that carry more history than a sign can explain. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world without simplifying it. Written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the bayou teaches the same thing Naomi, Louisiana teaches: le retour, the return, is the story, and the story is worth telling plain.

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

Find more poems about lower Louisiana at Phoenix, Jesuit Bend, Davant, Braithwaite, Pointe-a-la-Hache, and the bayou parishes of the Gulf South. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from the east bank citrus country of Plaquemines Parish, where the name Naomi carries the weight of biblical return and the Highway 39 communities carry the knowledge of what it means to come back to the only place that ever felt entirely true. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.