Poems About Time Passing — From a Boat Ramp in Dulac, Louisiana

Why Time Feels Different on the Water

Up north, the year keeps a calendar. Trees turn, the snow falls, you mark the months by what the yard looks like. In Dulac, Louisiana, the trees stay green and the year shows up in the water instead. The salt line creeps up after a dry winter. The shrimp run starts a week earlier than the year before. The boats sit a little lower at the dock than they did last spring. That's how a man down here knows time is moving — not by the clock on the wall, but by how the marsh is acting.

Most poems about time passing are written from a porch. They reach for the soft-focus version — sand through the fingers, a sunset, a clock with no hands. Mitchell Parfait writes them from a boat ramp at 5:30 a.m., coffee gone cold in the truck cup holder, knees stiffer than they were last shrimp season. The same dock plank he stepped on at twenty-two is the same one he steps on now. Only now he hears the wood differently.

That's the lane this book owns. Poems about time written by a man whose hands have callouses and whose son is now taller than him. Time here doesn't drift. It marks you. Order Dulac Poetry on Amazon for the price of a bait shrimp basket.

How the Seasons and the Tides Mark Time on the Bayou

Poems about getting older, in this part of the world, don't reach for big abstractions. They point at the specific boat, the specific morning, the specific water. A shrimper marks years by the boats he's worked — the Lady Renee, the Mae Belle, the one that sank in '09. A mother marks years by which kid stopped letting her kiss him on the forehead in front of his friends. The dock you stand on at fifty has every other version of you still standing on it.

Time here is layered, not linear. The smell of diesel and cut bait can put a man back in 1998 faster than any photograph. That kind of nostalgic poetry — the kind that comes from a real place — works because it doesn't announce what it's doing. It hands you a Coleman cooler and a green tackle box with two new latches and lets you do the rest. You get older the way the boat does. Slow, and then all at once when you look at it tied up in the slip and notice the paint.

Poems about missing the past hit hardest when the past is still standing in the same kitchen as the present. The cast-iron skillet his mother used. The neighbor who doesn't drive at night anymore but still cooks on Sundays. The Gulf still doing what the Gulf does. You can read more about how the water itself becomes a clock in Mitchell's work — and how his poems about home trade postcard versions of the bayou for the real one.

That's the difference between time-flies poetry written by somebody watching from a porch and the kind written by somebody with a rod in his hand. The first one is pretty. The second one is true. Time flies poetry at its best names the boat, the rod, the truck. Then it gets out of the way.

About Dulac Poetry and Mitchell Parfait

Mitchell Parfait is from Dulac, Louisiana. He grew up on the water and never moved off it. Dulac Poetry is his book — forty-five pages, paperback or Kindle on Amazon, written the way a man talks when the boat is tied up and the day is done. No flowery language. No academic moves. Plain words about the things a working life on the Gulf Coast does to a man over forty years.

The book sits in the same lane as the best poems about growing up on the water — the kid who learned to bait a hook at six, who's now baiting his own and telling his daddy the story wrong on purpose just to get a rise out of him. Mitchell writes about the cut, not the slow fade. Time doesn't take kids gradually in Dulac. It takes them in two frames: small, then gone. The book covers that handoff the way his poems about sons do — quietly, with no announcement.

Dulac itself is a small bayou town in Terrebonne Parish — shrimp boats, oyster luggers, hurricane scars, a single grocery, a long flat road that ends at the water. It's the kind of place where a man's handwriting changes after forty years of holding a line, where reading glasses live on top of the truck visor, where you can still hear your father's voice on the phone now coming out of your own mouth. If that's the kind of poetry you've been looking for, Dulac Poetry is on Amazon for $3.99 in Kindle. You can also read a poem from the book before you order.

That's the whole posture of the book. The same Gulf Coast patience that runs through poems about strength and resilience shows up here as a quiet about aging — getting older as something you build, not something you survive.

For the Dad Who Blinked and They Were Grown

Father's Day is June 21. Two weeks from publication of this post. The dad who looked up from the water one afternoon and realized his kids were gone — not lost, just grown. The handshake at the truck that lasts a second longer than it used to. The empty bed of the F-150 in the driveway where the boy used to leave his rod overnight. The moment a man realizes he's proud and sad at the exact same time, and that those are the same feeling.

He taught you to shrimp. To tie a knot. To fix an outboard in the rain. To listen to the wind before you trust the forecast. To be quiet when quiet was the right answer. He didn't have a speech ready when you grew up — most of them don't. And now you're the one teaching, and he's the one watching from the dock, and somewhere between the bait bucket and the boat ramp twenty years went by without anybody calling them out. That's what the best poems about growing up show you — not the graduations, but the small mornings.

Dulac Poetry is the Father's Day gift for the dad who doesn't need anything but could use something true. He won't say much when you hand it to him. He'll set it on the kitchen counter. A week later you'll find it open, face down, on the chair next to his coffee. That's how this book lands. For more, see poems about fathers and the full Father's Day poetry gift guide.

Somewhere a man is sitting on a dock right now thinking about all of this and not saying any of it. This book is for him.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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