Poems About Schriever, Louisiana

Schriever sits about fifteen miles north of Houma on LA-24, where Bayou Terrebonne curves inland through Terrebonne Parish before the land starts flattening toward the coast. The old Houma & Thibodaux Railroad junction once made Schriever a crossroads — a place where goods and people moved between the coast and the interior, where the bayou and the rail line met in the flat green country between the Gulf and the cane fields. The railroad is mostly memory now, but the junction character remains: Schriever is still a place that connects things. The crawfish ponds stretch back from the road in both directions come February, the flooded fields going pink in the early light. The sugarcane rises on the ridges above the waterline, taller than a man by July, bending in the heat. The camp roads off LA-24 drop toward the bayou and the family fishing camps downstream where the water spreads toward the marsh. At dawn, before anyone is awake, Bayou Terrebonne moves through all of it with the quiet of something that has been here longer than the roads, the railroad, the names on the mailboxes. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY is rooted in that same Terrebonne Parish patience.

Life in Schriever — Crawfish, Cane, and the Inland Bayou Character

Crawfishing season is the organizing fact of the Schriever year. It starts in late winter — sometimes as early as January if the water temperatures cooperate — and runs through May or into early June before the heat shuts it down. The ponds get flooded in the fall, the rice stubble left in to feed the crawfish over winter, and then in February the traps go in. A man up before dawn in March, running his traps on a flat-bottomed aluminum skiff, moving down the flooded rows in the gray light — mais, that is a life that asks everything of you and gives back exactly what it decides to give. You learn patience the way the crawfish teach it: you set the trap, you leave it, you come back. What is there is there. What is not, is not.

The sugar co-op runs north toward Thibodaux and Raceland, the cane trucks moving through Schriever on LA-24 from October through January during the grinding season. The smell of it — that rich, burnt-sugar smell that fills the air when the mills are running — is one of the markers of the season in Terrebonne Parish the same way the smell of salt marsh marks the coast. Schriever is inland enough that it gets both: the cane on the ridge and the marsh smell drifting up from the south on a south wind. The coastal communities — Dulac, Chauvin, Cocodrie — are thirty miles and a world away, built on the open water, exposed to the Gulf in a way that Schriever is not. Schriever is the parish's interior, where the land is still solid enough for the old family farms, the boucheries in fall when the first cold front comes through, the Catholic parishes that have been organizing the community calendar since before Louisiana was a state.

Cher, the older people call to each other on the church steps after Mass — allons, come on, let's go, a Sunday dinner is on the stove and the family is waiting. The camp roads run off the highway toward the water, and on weekends in fall, the fishing camps downstream fill up with three generations of the same family eating boudin by the water, the kids running the bank, mon vieux watching the line. The Cajun French is softer here than it was in the grandparents' generation, mixed with English in the way that languages mix when the culture is changing but the land is not. The land does not change. The bayou does not change. The crawfish come back every year. That seasonal patience runs through every poem in DULAC POETRY.

Featured Poem: The Crawfish Man's Hands

In Mitchell Parfait's voice — a son watching his father run the traps in the March cold, learning what the crawfish season teaches about patience and inheritance:

My father's hands in March.
Red from the cold, red from the water,
red from reaching into the traps
before the sun clears the treeline.

He never told me what the crawfish taught him.
He showed me instead —
set the trap, leave it, come back.
What is there is there.
What is not, you did not earn yet.

Mais, the bayou does not owe you anything.
It just runs south toward the coast
the way it has always run,
the same water his father moved on,
the same mud under the same flat-bottomed boat.

I watched him empty the traps without hurry,
the way you do a thing you have done
a thousand times and will do
a thousand times more.

The season opens in February.
It closes when it closes.
Between those two facts
a man learns his own patience
or he doesn't.

My father's hands knew.
I am still learning.

The poem does not explain itself. A father's hands, red from the cold water in March, moving through the traps with a practiced quiet. The crawfish season as teacher — not a metaphor exactly, but the literal thing itself: set the trap, leave it, come back. You cannot rush the crawfish. You cannot rush the bayou. The knowledge passes from father to son not in words but in watching, in doing the same thing in the same water for the same reasons. Mais, the bayou does not owe you anything — the Cajun French surfaces the way it surfaces in a real conversation, unbidden, in the one moment where English does not quite fit. That inheritance — knowledge passed through work, not words — is at the heart of DULAC POETRY.

Schriever in Louisiana's Literary Landscape

Schriever sits at a kind of inland mirror to the coastal bayou communities — the same Bayou Terrebonne that runs past Dulac and Chauvin toward the Gulf passes through here first, slower, wider, less urgent. Mitchell Parfait writes about the coast, but the inland bayou is in the same tradition: the seasonal rhythms of crawfish and cane that replace the shrimping and oystering of the south, the same Catholic parishes marking the same calendar, the same Cajun French surfacing at the same moments in a conversation. The Terrebonne Parish literary territory moves from the open Gulf through the marshland, through the river towns, and into the inland heartland — and Schriever is where that heartland holds the ridgeline above the water. DULAC POETRY looks south from the coast toward the horizon, but the inland communities like Schriever are the root system that feeds everything below. The crawfish season, the cane season, the hunting season — DULAC POETRY holds all of it.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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Experience Schriever Through DULAC POETRY

Schriever is the kind of place Mitchell Parfait writes about — where the work is physical and seasonal and passed down through the hands before the words, where the bayou sets the pace for everything else, where a man's patience is measured in crawfish traps and cane rows and the length of the season. If you know the camp road off LA-24 in the November cold, the way the boucherie fire smells at five in the morning, the March light on the flooded crawfish pond, the sugar-mill smell in the air from October through January — then Parfait's DULAC POETRY was written for your parish. He grew up in Dulac, Louisiana on Bayou Grand Caillou, thirty miles south of here on the same Terrebonne Parish waterways, and the inland bayou communities are his root country even as the coast is his home ground. Forty-five pages of the working bayou life — the crawfish and the cane, the faith and the inheritance, the Cajun French that surfaces when there is no English word that fits — available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99), written by a man who has not left this world behind. The book is on Amazon now.

If you are looking for poems about Schriever Louisiana — or for bayou poetry about the Terrebonne Parish inland corridor, the crawfish ponds at dawn, the sugarcane on the ridge, the camp roads running toward the Gulf, the Cajun French spoken at the church steps after Sunday Mass — this is where that work lives. DULAC POETRY is available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0FXVZDLZG. Written from inside the bayou world, by a poet from Dulac, Louisiana who carries it everywhere he goes.

Read alongside poems about Thibodaux, Louisiana and poems about Raceland, Louisiana to follow the full arc of the Bayou Terrebonne and Lafourche corridors — from the inland sugar parishes through the coastal shrimping communities, all the way to where the land meets the Gulf. Then read about DULAC POETRY on the book page, or learn about Mitchell Parfait on the author page.

DULAC POETRY — Schriever Louisiana bayou poetry on Amazon. Get Your Copy on Amazon | Buy the Book | Read Dulac Poetry