Poems About Woodlawn, Louisiana

Woodlawn, Louisiana: Highway 39, the Levee Road, and a Name That Carries a Memory

South of Nairn on Highway 39, the east bank of Plaquemines Parish continues its narrow corridor between the Mississippi River levee and the marsh. Woodlawn sits in this stretch, a small unincorporated community that appears on plat maps more reliably than on signage, quieter and less remarked on than its neighbors to the north and south. The road runs along the levee, the only raised ground for miles in either direction, and the community has organized itself along this spine the way every east bank community does: close to the road, close to the levee, aware that the land falls away quickly on both sides. To the west, the earthen levee wall hides the river. To the east, the marsh begins within a few hundred yards.

The name Woodlawn promises trees, a lawn of them, woodland in the old English sense of a place where the forest holds the ground. But this is marsh and levee country, not woodland country, and the name carries its promise strangely here. What the name may remember are les chênes, the live oaks that grow along the levee road where there is enough high ground to hold their roots, the same trees that stand along every raised stretch of the lower river corridor, their canopy shading the road and their roots finding the narrow band of solid earth between the levee and the swamp. Whether the name came from those trees, or was carried down from somewhere else the way many Plaquemines names were, the oaks remain: the most visible sign that something other than water holds this ground. The river runs just over the levee top, invisible from the road but shaping everything: the alignment of Highway 39, the way the land sits, the working life that has always been organized around what the river and the marsh provide.

Life in Woodlawn: Shrimping Families, the Levee Road, and the Storm That Came Over the Bank

The working life of Woodlawn has always been built on the water. Shrimping and oystering families have worked the bays and channels south and east of the community for generations, the boats going out through the tidal passes that connect the marsh to the open Gulf, the men and women who ran them carrying the knowledge of currents and reef beds and seasonal patterns the way their parents and grandparents carried it before them: by practice, by inheritance, by a familiarity with the water that does not require charts because the water is already known. The levee road is the only road. You arrive at Woodlawn by Highway 39 from the north or from the south, and you leave the same way. There is no other raised ground.

The strip between the levee and the marsh is narrow here. A flooding event from the river side and a surge event from the marsh side leave almost no buffer. East bank Plaquemines families have always understood this geometry, building their lives on the assumption that the water would sometimes win and that the knowledge of how to return mattered as much as the knowledge of how to leave. Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. The east bank levees in Plaquemines Parish were overtopped. Storm surge moved across the land that had been dry ground, reaching depths that destroyed structures and drowned the markers of the working life along the levee road. Woodlawn flooded. The damage was severe.

The return was partial and slow. Some families came back and cleared the waterlines from the walls and put the boats back in the water and went south to the channels. Some did not come back. The community that remained after 2005 was smaller and quieter, the gaps in the working infrastructure visible in empty lots and in the absence of neighbors who had been there before the storm. What persisted was not restoration but something more modest and more genuine: the daily choice to stay, to work the water, to hold the levee road as the spine of a life worth continuing. That persistence, understated and specific, is what Woodlawn carries into the present.

Featured Poem: Woodlawn

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the oaks along the levee road at dawn, the boats leaving south through the passes, the high-water seasons that press the river against the earthen wall, and the families who cleared the waterlines and went back out. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a Gulf Coast bayou community where the working-water life and the knowledge of what it costs to stay are understood from the inside.

The poem closes on the two lines that hold everything about this place: The name says wood. The ground says water. Both are right about this place. Woodlawn promises woodland in its name and delivers marsh and levee and the live oaks on the raised strip of ground that is all the wood this corridor ever offered. The poem earns that close by moving through the dawn light under the oak canopy, the boats leaving south, the high-water seasons pressing the river against the wall, and the families who came back after the storm and went back out to the channels. The contradiction in the name is not a failing. It is the place being fully itself: both things true at once, the name and the ground in honest tension.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Gulf South Voice That Names the Quiet Places

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the working life is organized around tides and channels and the daily decision to go out when the conditions allow. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through coastal Louisiana with the specificity of someone who understands these communities not as scenic corridors but as places where real families have built real lives on narrow strips of ground between the river and the marsh. Woodlawn belongs to this world: quieter than its neighbors, less remarked on, the kind of place that shows up on plat maps more than on signage, and that carries in its name a memory of something the ground itself does not quite confirm.

The emotional register of Dulac Poetry is the register of endurance without performance: faith, love, the natural world, the sea, the cost of staying and the reasons people stay anyway. The book speaks directly to working-water communities along the Gulf Coast, to places that carry names at odds with what they became, to the families who cleared the waterlines after the storm and went back out to the channels without needing anyone to call it remarkable. Woodlawn is one of those places. The oaks along the levee road are still there. The boats still go south before the light. The name and the ground are still in honest tension, and both are still right about this place. The book is available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99).

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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Explore Dulac Poetry on Amazon

If Woodlawn holds you: the oaks along the levee road at dawn, the river invisible behind the earthen wall but shaping everything, the shrimping families going south through the passes before the light, the high-water seasons that press the water against the bank, and the families who came back after the storm and cleared the waterlines and went back to the channels without ceremony. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the bayou and the Gulf and the working-water life share the same understanding of what it means to hold a piece of ground that the water keeps testing.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the east bank levee road, the live oaks, and the working communities of Plaquemines Parish and the Gulf South.

Find more poems about the east bank Plaquemines Parish corridor at Nairn, Bohemia, Davant, Pointe-a-la-Hache, and Myrtle Grove. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Woodlawn, Louisiana, east bank Plaquemines Parish, where Highway 39 runs south past the live oaks on the levee road and the name promises woodland in a place built on marsh and water. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.