Poems About the Earth — Written From the Ground That Keeps Getting Flooded

Most poems about the earth are written from solid ground. From mountains, canyons, old-growth forests — places where the earth has been in the same place for ten thousand years and will still be there ten thousand years from now. That kind of earth poetry is about permanence. It is about stone and soil and the reliable presence of the land underfoot. In Dulac, Louisiana, the earth is not like that. The earth here is temporary. It floats. It sinks. It disappears into the Gulf a football field at a time, every hundred minutes, and has been doing so for decades. DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait is written from that earth — not the kind that endures, but the kind that loves you anyway, right up until the water takes it.

What Earth Poetry Usually Misses

The literary tradition of earth poetry is built on permanence. The mountain that will outlast the poet by a million years. The canyon carved by patient water over geological time. The ancient forest where the roots go down deeper than anyone has ever dug. The soil that has been in the same field since before the first farmer turned it. Even when earth poetry mourns change — a clear-cut forest, a strip-mined hillside — it mourns against a backdrop of something that was once solid and lasted and should have lasted longer. The implicit promise of earth poetry is that the earth itself endures, even when humans damage it.

But coastal Louisiana earth is not like that. The marshland along Highway 24 that was here twenty years ago is not here now. The barrier islands that Mitchell Parfait's grandfather fished from have shrunk. Some have disappeared entirely. The earth Mitchell grew up on is not the same earth his grandfather stood on — not because it changed, but because it is gone. The ground here does not outlast anyone. In some cases, the ground does not outlast a single generation. That is a completely different relationship with the land than any mountain-poem or canyon-poem has ever reckoned with. When Mitchell Parfait writes poems about the land, he is writing about earth that is already partially underwater — and the rest is on its way.

In Dulac, the Earth Is Disappearing

Louisiana loses a football field of land every 100 minutes. That is not a metaphor. That is the actual measurement, published by the U.S. Geological Survey, confirmed by satellite imagery, experienced personally by everyone who grew up in the coastal parishes and watched familiar ground go underwater in their lifetime. The mechanisms are multiple and they work together: coastal erosion washing sediment into the Gulf, subsidence pulling the land itself downward as the Mississippi River no longer replenishes it with new sediment, saltwater intrusion killing the cypress forests whose roots once held the marsh together, sea level rise accelerating the flooding of land that is already below where it used to be.

Dulac sits at the end of Highway 24, twelve feet above sea level. After every significant storm, the island shrinks a little more. The shoreline that was there in 1990 is not the shoreline that is there now, and the shoreline that is there now will not be the shoreline in 2040. The earth here is not solid in the way that most nature poetry books imagine earth to be. It floats. The marsh grass grows from organic matter compressed over centuries, not from bedrock, and when the marsh grass dies — from saltwater intrusion, from oil contamination, from erosion — the ground it grew from dissolves. You can push a rod through the ground in some parts of the marsh and it will go down twenty feet before it finds anything solid. The earth in Dulac is not a foundation. It is a skin over water, and the water is winning.

What a Disappearing Earth Teaches a Poet

Most philosophies of impermanence are taught as ideas. Buddhism teaches that nothing lasts — but the monk teaching it is sitting on ground that will still be there after he is gone. The Stoics wrote about the brevity of human life against the backdrop of mountains that were as permanent as anything they could imagine. Even the poets who write about loss and change write from a place where the loss is personal, temporal — a person gone, a season ended, a time passed. The earth itself, in almost all of literary tradition, endures.

In Dulac, the earth itself is the thing that is going. That is a different kind of education in impermanence. It is impermanence as geology — not as philosophy or season or personal grief, but as the literal fact of the ground underfoot. You love something knowing it will not hold. You build a house on ground that is sinking and you call it home anyway, because it is home, and the alternative is to go somewhere the earth is solid and leave everything that makes you who you are. The attachment that Mitchell Parfait writes poems from is an attachment to land that may not exist in fifty years — and that fragility is not a reason not to love it. It is precisely the reason to love it harder, to pay attention more carefully, to write it down before the water takes it. You hold the earth gently in Dulac because you know it won't hold you forever. That knowledge is in the soil itself.

DULAC POETRY — Written From the Ground Beneath the Water

When DULAC POETRY describes the earth, it is not describing mountains or canyons or ancient forests. It is describing mud and marshgrass and the feeling of ground that gives underfoot — the specific, low, wet earth of coastal Louisiana, where the line between land and water is not a line at all but a gradation, a negotiation, something that changes with the tide and the season and the storm track. Mitchell Parfait did not write abstract earth poems. He wrote from the ground he stood on — ground that he knows better than anyone, and that he knows is disappearing.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

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What's Missing From Earth Poetry

There is an entire voice that is almost entirely absent from published earth poetry and nature poetry: the voice of someone who is watching their homeland literally erode. Not disappear through neglect or abandonment or the passage of time — disappear physically, the actual earth going into the actual water while the people who love it are still living on what remains of it. This is a real human experience. It is the experience of coastal Louisiana, of certain Pacific island nations, of Arctic communities watching the permafrost beneath their homes liquefy. It is one of the defining experiences of the early twenty-first century. But it has almost no presence in the literary canon of earth poetry, which is still largely organized around the assumption that the earth endures.

DULAC POETRY carries that voice — not as environmental polemic, not as a political argument about climate change and coastal policy, but as the daily reality of growing up in a place that is loved precisely because it is fragile. Mitchell Parfait is not writing to argue. He is writing because the earth he grew up on deserves to be written about — deserves witness, deserves language, deserves the same careful attention that poets have given to Yosemite and the Berkshires and the Yorkshire moors — because it is beautiful and because it is going and because nobody else is writing it down. The Gulf Coast earth poetry in DULAC POETRY fills a gap in the literary record that most readers of nature poetry books have never thought to notice — because they have never stood on ground that was disappearing under their feet.

The Ground Is Still There — For Now

Dulac is still there. The people are still there. The shrimp boats still go out in the morning, the same way they have always gone out, following the same routes through the same bayous to the same grounds. The marsh grass is still growing where it can find purchase. The cypress trees that survived the saltwater intrusion still stand in the places where the salinity has not yet risen high enough to kill them. Children still grow up in Dulac, learning the water and the weather the way children in Dulac have always learned them — from the adults who already know it, by being on the water from the time they are old enough to sit in a boat.

But the earth shifts and sinks and some of it is already gone — the marshland that used to buffer the community from open water, the barrier islands that used to slow the storm surge, the shoreline where people used to fish that is now open Gulf. The ground that Mitchell Parfait grew up on is holy — not despite its fragility, but because of it. You do not take holy ground for granted. You do not walk on it without noticing it. You write it down while you still can, with the care and attention of someone who knows that the writing is an act of preservation as much as an act of art. That is what DULAC POETRY is — poems from the ground he stood on, offered to anyone who wants to stand there with him, for as long as the ground holds. Read DULAC POETRY →

Read these poems alongside poems about the bayou and poems about the marsh to understand the full landscape Mitchell Parfait writes from — a world where the earth and the water are always in negotiation.