Poems About the Cypress Tree — Written From a Place Where the Trees Are Standing in the Water

When people search for poems about the cypress tree, they find verse written from a distance — the gothic South, Spanish moss, romantic decay. What they don't find are poems written by someone who grew up alongside the cypress, who watched it move from dry land to brackish water in a single lifetime. Mitchell Parfait writes from that world. That is what DULAC POETRY carries.

What Most Cypress Tree Poetry Gets Wrong

Most poems about the cypress tree treat them as atmosphere — gothic Southern backdrop, Spanish moss hanging, romantic decay. They're written from the outside, from a car window or a tourist boat. Nobody's writing about the cypress tree you grew up alongside, the one that used to be on dry land and now stands knee-deep in marsh water because the land has sunk around it.

The cypress in most poetry is a set piece. In Dulac, Louisiana, it's a landmark, a reference point, a thing you watch disappear. Writing about it from inside that reality is completely different from writing about it as scenery. That gap — between symbol and fact — is where Gulf South cypress tree poems written from the inside live. This is the version poetry has mostly missed. Order the paperback and read the difference.

The Cypress Tree in Dulac

In Dulac, the cypress tree is a marker of what was. You can drive down Highway 24 and see stands of dead cypress stumps in open water — places that were forested land a generation ago. The saltwater intrusion killed them. The subsidence pulled the land under. What's left standing in the brackish water isn't a symbol of Southern mystery. It's evidence.

When Mitchell Parfait writes about the cypress tree, he's not reaching for a symbol. He's writing about something that changed in his lifetime — land that became water, forest that became stump field, a tree that used to shade the road and now stands in the salt tide. The cypress tree in Gulf South poetry isn't decorative. It's a timestamp. That's what makes Dulac Poetry on Amazon unlike anything else in the poetry canon.

Why Gulf South Cypress Poetry Is Different

The poetry canon has cypress trees in Louisiana — but they're written by people passing through. Faulkner country, plantation gothic, Spanish moss and decay. The cypress as Southern Gothic prop. Nobody writes it from inside a community that watched the cypress forests die in real time, that used cypress wood to build the boats their grandfathers shrimped on, that knows the stands that are gone by the names of families who used to live nearby.

Mitchell Parfait writes from inside that knowledge. It's a different poem entirely. Not atmosphere — witness. Not backdrop — testimony. Mitchell Parfait's debut collection carries that weight on every page — the weight of someone who watched the cypress forests change and decided to write it down before the language for it was gone too. Read the full collection and hear what the inside sounds like.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

Order the Paperback →Get the Kindle ($3.99) →

The Cypress Poems You Haven't Read

The cypress tree poems that don't exist yet: the stand of stumps in open water that used to be a forest your grandfather cut through in a pirogue. The dead tree that's been standing in the same spot of salt water for twenty years, slowly bleaching. The healthy one at the edge of a ridge road that marks where the land still holds. The morning the crew passed a stand at first light and nobody said anything because there was nothing to say.

These are witness poems — not elegies, not symbols. Testimony for a landscape in the process of being lost. That witness — the kind that can only come from having actually lived alongside something your whole life — is what the Dulac Poetry book carries. Most readers looking for Louisiana cypress poetry have found the poems that make the cypress atmospheric or gothic. They haven't found the poems that simply know it — the cypress as daily fact, as timestamp, as the tree that tells you where the land used to be. That version is rarer and truer and harder to write. available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99).

What It Means to Write About the Cypress Tree From Here

To write about the cypress tree from Dulac is to write about time. Not poetic time — geological time compressed into a human lifetime. The land sinking, the saltwater coming in, the trees dying where they stand because the ground beneath them changed. Mitchell Parfait writes about the cypress tree the way a geologist might write about a stratum — as evidence of what was here and what has changed.

The cypress tree poems in the Dulac Poetry book aren't elegies. They're testimony. Written by a man who grew up watching the cypress forests change — who knows the stands that are gone by the names of families who used to live nearby. The book is available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99). It's poetry for people who grew up watching things disappear and never had language for it until now. Read alongside poems about the bayou and poems about the pelican to understand the full world Mitchell writes from. Then get the Kindle edition ($3.99) or order the paperback and read the poems themselves.