Poems About the Night Sky — Written Under the Stars of the Louisiana Gulf Coast

The Sky Over Dulac

In Dulac, Louisiana, you can see the whole sky. There are no mountains. There are no skyscrapers. There are barely any trees tall enough to interrupt the line where the marsh meets the air. What you have, instead, is flat brown water that goes on for miles until it becomes flat black water, and above that flat black water you have a bowl of stars that feels less like a ceiling and more like a second ocean turned upside down. The whole night sky sits on you out here. There is nothing in the way of it. The best poems about the night sky are written by people who live in places where the sky is still allowed to be the sky.

Most of America has lost its dark. Streetlights and parking lots and the orange glow of the suburbs have washed the stars out of the sky for ninety percent of the country. But Dulac is at the end of the road — the last town before the marsh swallows the highway — and the dark down here is still a real, full, thick, ancient kind of dark. You can walk out on a dock at one in the morning and count constellations the same way the men who fished this water in 1840 counted them. Orion sitting low. The Big Dipper tipped sideways. The Milky Way arching from one horizon to the other like a smear of milk somebody knocked off the counter and never quite wiped up. That is the sky DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait was written under, and that is the sky the poems carry inside them.

Mitchell is a poet from Dulac, and he has spent more nights under that sky than most of us will ever spend under any sky. He writes from inside that wonder — not the wonder of a postcard, but the working wonder of a man whose grandfather navigated by those same stars and whose own boys are beginning to learn the names of them. The poems are quiet. They don't shout at the sky. They just sit beside it.

What Poems About the Night Sky Do

The best night sky poetry does one thing better than almost any other kind of writing — it gives you the feeling of wonder back. We lose it. We lose it slowly, the way a person loses anything precious: a few minutes at a time, a few weeks at a time, a few years at a time, until one morning you realize you haven't looked up in a long while. The phone is in your hand and the calendar is on the wall and the headlights of the car in front of you are the only light that has reached your eyes for days. Poems about looking up at the stars are an invitation to remember that there is a ceiling on this world that is still bigger than every problem you brought into the day.

Poems about the sky orient us. They remind us we are small, which is not a sad reminder — it is a freeing one. The work crisis, the mortgage, the argument with the brother-in-law, all of it shrinks back to a manageable size when you stand under a real dark sky and remember the math of it: ten thousand stars overhead, every single one of them older than this country, most of them older than this planet. Poetry about wonder is not escapism. It is re-scaling. It is a poem-shaped reset on what counts as big.

The Stars and the Water Sitting on Each Other

Here is what nobody tells you about the night sky over the Gulf of Mexico: it doubles. The water down here, on a still night, is so flat and so dark that the stars don't just hang above the boat — they sit underneath it too. You look up and see Orion. You look down and see Orion again, only quieter, slightly broken up where a fish has just bumped the surface. A man standing on the bow of a shrimp boat at two in the morning is standing inside the sky, not under it. There is no other place I have ever been where you can feel that. It is the gift of where Mitchell is from. It is the gift the Gulf of Mexico has been giving the men who work it for as long as men have been working it.

The fishermen out here still navigate by the stars when they have to. Most of them have GPS now. Most of them have phones. But every captain who has been doing this long enough has a story about the night the electronics went dark and he came home by the North Star and the shape of the marsh and the smell of the wind. The stars are a backup. The stars are a compass. The stars are also, on a quiet trip, company — the same constellations a man's grandfather watched from this same water in 1962, the same constellations that watched the Houma fishermen before him, the same constellations that watched the Spanish before them. The sky is the one thing that hasn't changed down here. The land erodes. The town shrinks. The hurricanes come. But Orion comes back every winter exactly where he was the winter before. That is a kind of faithfulness that DULAC POETRY takes seriously.

Why DULAC POETRY Is the Right Book for Anyone Who Loves the Sky

A lot of poems about stars get written from inside an apartment in a city by a poet who has never actually seen a real Milky Way. That kind of poetry can be beautiful, but it reaches for the sky as a metaphor — it never quite arrives at the sky as a place. DULAC POETRY is different because Mitchell Parfait is not reaching. He is remembering. The sky in these poems is the sky he has actually stood under, the same sky his daddy stood under, the same sky that sits on the marsh on a clear December night when the air is so cold and so clear you can see individual stars inside the haze of the Milky Way. The wonder is specific. The wonder is local. The wonder is earned.

That specificity is what makes the book travel. A reader in Montana or Maine or Manchester picks it up and feels the same wonder under their own sky, because the poems aren't telling anybody what to feel. They're showing the shape of one man's wonder honestly enough that you can lay your own beside it. The same way the poem “Pray” sits inside a single moment on the water and somehow opens up to include every reader who has ever asked God for anything, the sky poems in DULAC POETRY sit inside a single dock at midnight and somehow include every porch light and every small-town backyard and every pickup truck pulled off the highway so the kids can lie on the hood and look up. The wonder is portable. The wonder is shared. It always has been. That is the pairing of poems about the sky with the kind of spiritual poetry that doesn't announce itself as religious — it just looks up and lets you do the rest.

For Anyone Who Still Looks Up

If you are the kind of person who still pulls the car over when the sky is doing something — if you stand on the back porch in December because the cold air is the clearest air of the year, if you wake the kids up for a meteor shower even when it's a school night — this book was written for you. DULAC POETRY is forty-five poems from a real bayou by a real man, and the night sky is woven through them the way it's woven through any life lived close to the water. It pairs naturally with the hope poetry the collection is built on — because hope, like stars, is most easily seen from inside the dark.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

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