Poems About Triumph, Louisiana

Triumph: The Name on the West Bank Levee Road

Drive south on Highway 23 along the west bank of the Mississippi River and the signs for communities come up at intervals, each one a name someone gave to a piece of ground and the people who settled it. Empire. Buras. Boothville. And then, somewhere in that lower corridor of Plaquemines Parish, Triumph. The name stops you even on a map. It is too large a word for a small fishing community on a narrow strip of land between the river levee and the back marsh, a community that has been hit by storms, eaten by erosion, and contaminated by one of the worst oil spills in American history.

The French settlers who came to lower Plaquemines Parish and named this place knew the word in their own language: le triomphe. The triumph. It was not an ironic name when they gave it. It was aspiration, the declaration that this ground at the edge of the continent was worth claiming, worth working, worth building a life on. The irony accumulated later, through every storm that pushed water over the levee, through every season the shrimp did not come back in the numbers the families needed, through the spring of 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon blowout put oil on the fishing grounds just south of here and the irony became something heavier than a word.

What makes Triumph worth a poem is not the irony itself but what the community did with it. They kept the name. That is the whole story, and it is not a small one: to hold onto a word that means winning when winning is exactly what has been denied you, repeatedly, over generations, and to keep holding it, not out of stubbornness or ignorance but out of something that does not have a clean English word for it. It is the same quality the French settlers named when they first put a word on this ground, and it has not left.

Life in Triumph: Shrimping, Oystering, and the Deepwater Horizon

The working life of Triumph is the working life of the lower Plaquemines Parish west bank: shrimping and oystering families who have worked these waters across generations, running boats out through the lower passes and the intracoastal to the Gulf grounds that have defined this community since before the levee road had a name. The seasons here are the seasons of the water. Brown shrimp in the summer, white shrimp in the fall, oysters pulled from the reefs that built up over decades in the brackish bays below. The boats go out before light and come back when the hold is full or the weather turns.

The proximity to the open Gulf is the defining fact of life here. Triumph sits on the west bank of Plaquemines Parish, close enough to the Gulf that the community has always understood itself as a working outpost at the edge of the delta, not insulated from the Gulf by the miles of marsh that protect communities farther north but in direct relation to it, taking what it offered and taking what it brought. The fishing grounds just south of Triumph were among the most productive in Louisiana, and the families who worked them carried that knowledge forward from parents and grandparents.

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon wellhead exploded forty-one miles offshore in the Mississippi Canyon. The blowout that followed released nearly five million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the next eighty-seven days. The oil plume moved with the current toward the Louisiana coast, and the fishing grounds immediately south of Triumph were among the first areas to be contaminated. The federal fishery closures that followed shut down the shrimping and oystering operations that the community depended on. For families whose entire income came from the water, the closures were not an inconvenience but a removal of the ground beneath their feet. The spill coated the oyster reefs that had taken decades to build. The shrimp boats sat at the dock. The season that should have been summer 2010 did not happen.

The recovery from Deepwater Horizon was uneven and incomplete in ways that the national attention span never fully registered. Oyster beds that were killed by the oil took years to come back, and some did not come back fully. The fishermen who took BP cleanup work to survive the closures reported health effects from the dispersants and the oil itself. The compensation process was contested and slow. And through it all, Triumph remained Triumph, the name on the west bank levee road, the word that had accumulated a second layer of meaning that the first settlers could not have anticipated and that the current residents carry without complaint.

Featured Poem: Triumph

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the levee road and the boats, the name the settlers gave this ground and what the name became after the storms, the erosion, and the oil. The poem opens on the water and builds through the layers of what Triumph has meant across time. It closes on the three lines that hold the whole truth of the place without simplifying it.

The poem closes on the three lines that hold what Triumph is: The name was not ironic when they gave it. / It became ironic later. / They kept it anyway. The irony is not the point. The keeping is the point. A community that has been told repeatedly by storms, by erosion, by a blowout forty-one miles offshore, that the name is not accurate, and that has held onto the name across all of it, is not being ironic. It is saying something truer than irony allows.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Gulf Coast Voice That Names What Has Been Lost

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the water is never far from anything and the names of places carry the same weight that Triumph carries on the west bank of Plaquemines Parish. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through the working-water communities of coastal Louisiana, from the bayou parishes to the lower Plaquemines Parish corridor and the Highway 23 communities that defined themselves by what they caught and built on difficult ground. Triumph sits squarely in those concerns, and the irony of its name is the irony that all these communities have learned to carry.

The literary tradition Parfait writes from is one that does not perform grief. The Gulf Coast voice that shapes this work names what has been lost with precision and then moves to what remains, not because what remains is sufficient but because it is what is true. The Deepwater Horizon spill contaminated the fishing grounds below Triumph. The oyster beds were damaged, some of them severely. The shrimping families lost a season. This is not a metaphor for something else. It is what happened. The poem holds that fact directly and does not look away from it, and then it holds the other fact: the boats still go out before light, the grounds came back enough to run the boats, the name on the sign did not change.

Writing about places like Triumph requires a particular restraint. The irony of the name invites cleverness, and cleverness would be a betrayal of what these communities are. Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same dynamics operate, where the name of a place and the life inside that name have been under pressure from the same forces, storms and erosion and the economics of working water, and where the response has always been to stay and to keep going. That experience is not transferable from the outside, and the poetry earns its ground by knowing it from the inside.

Dulac Poetry on Amazon is where this work is collected: Gulf Coast poems of working water and the communities that built their lives on the lower delta, the Highway 23 corridor, the bayou parishes, and the names that carry more history than the signs suggest, written by a poet from Dulac, Louisiana who knows what it means to keep a name that the world keeps testing.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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If Triumph holds you: the fishing community on the west bank levee road, the name that accumulated irony through storms and erosion and the Deepwater Horizon oil that reached these grounds first, the boats that still go out before light because the grounds came back enough to run them. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same commitment to working difficult water holds: the place defines the life, the name matters, and the people who keep going after the oil know what the ground is worth.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the west bank levee road, the lower delta fishing grounds, and the Gulf South communities that hold their names through everything.

Find more poems about the west bank Plaquemines Parish corridor at Buras, Empire, Port Sulphur, Venice, and Boothville. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Triumph, Louisiana, in Plaquemines Parish on the west bank of the Mississippi River along Highway 23, a fishing community where the name carries the weight of storms, erosion, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, and where the people kept the name anyway. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.