Bessie Senette has published her first book, Cutting the Clouds: a Bayou Mystic’s Poems, Musings, and Imaginings – an autobiographical collection of poems and essays about the life and culture of her bayou upbringing and the spirituality that informs her traditional healing gifts.
A high-spirited, creative, solemn, and above all joyous woman, she celebrates her birthday for the entire month of August, otherwise known as the Besstival. Anyone born in August is welcomed as a Besstivite. The High Feast day of the Besstival (Bessie’s actual birthday) is known as the Besstiva. When her Muse is not in the mood to muse, she cooks. Bessie’s home is an oasis of hospitality, and yet her husband, Tom, calls it a fortress of solitude. Somehow it works. She works as a supplemental grandmother and primary Mimsie to Eden and Noah.
As an ordained minister, she officiates an ecumenical liturgy for a small congregation of like-minded and just “slightly” wacky folk who are lovingly referred to as the Bessbyterians.
Bessie is a polydactyl poet, born with six toes on her left foot. Some of her friends think she should have a reality TV show but she insists that it would have to be an UnReality show. All are certain the ratings would be astronomical.
THE BAYOU MYSTIC 
Life has it’s journeys and thanks to you mine are not scary. You have taught me so much and I am very thankful. Big hugs. Darlene aka Queen Gator…
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Awe Shucks! Love you, too.
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I love you Bessie!
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back at you my sweet Bellerina!
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Hello ma’am
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Pieknie me dear friend Bessie!
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Love you too.
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Love you more! Thanks, T
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When do you expect book from publisher?
BTW… I have a picture of you nine and half months pregnant playing croquet… lol
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I probably look 9 1/2 months pregnant. That boy was 8 #s at birth.
Trust me you will be notified when I am published.
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You will have a holiday book signing. That sounds nice to me. Any thoughts?
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That was the plan. Yes
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Bessie, I can’t believe someone else celebrates their birthday for the entire month of August!! Mine’s even a holy day – August 15th! I enjoyed seeing you at lunch last week!
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It was lovely meeting you at Malvern Books in Austin. I’m glad I bought your book. Your opening talk reminded me of Thomas Cole’s “The Voyage of Life”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_Life
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Thank you for coming Brian. I enjoyed the link.
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Gorgeous
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expedite
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Bessie: Would you allow your poem “Louisiana Pines” to be included in a new anthology of environmental poems to be published by Portals Press). I remember you from your reading some years ago at The Maple Leaf in New Orleans. You will be in good company (Darrell Bourque, Julie Kane, Ava Haymon etc). Thanks for your consideration. John P. Travis travport@bellsouth.net
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Of course, John. It has been revised a few times. I’ll send the completed poem here.
LOUISIANA PINES
HOMELAND POEMS AND VIGNETTES
BESSIE A. SENETTE
Sage Femme D’espirit
Praise for Louisiana Pines
With a deft hand and in a resonant voice, Bessie Senette goes deep into love of home and humanity in Louisiana Pines. From dancehalls to the mysteries of Louisiana’s varied landscapes, Senette calls upon ancestors who told stories to keep histories alive and their human connections tightly-bound. In her poem, Holy Stick, she is given the power to speak while being fully heard. This book is the Holy Stick that she carries with her to speak Truth, transporting and transforming us in the process.
~Clare L. Martin, author of Eating the Heart First, Seek the Holy Dark, and Crone.
How we spend each breath matters, Bessie Senette reminds us, and we are wise to listen further. At once deeply rooted in her native Louisiana of shimmering light and sands’ murderous burn and encompassing our entire blue planet, Louisiana Pines is in toto a treasured wonderment. We can almost taste the gumbo, smell the fetid bayou waters. We may confront life’s many griefs, but Bessie bids us follow her from heartbreak back to joy.
~Karla Linn Merrifield, poet, Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select)
Acknowledgements
Cover Art by Stephen J. Hawkins
Earlier versions of the following poems appeared in the online poetry magazine, MockingHeart Review:
L’histoire
Louisiana Pines
Shrimp to Fry
Bridges
Holy Stick
A Creation Story
Thanks to Dennis Paul Williams, and Debra Bailey for the inspiration that inspired The Color Green and History Bears Witness.
Special thanks to Clare L. Martin for her unwavering support and her skillful editing of this work.
Table of Contents
History Bears Witness
Storytelling
Lost in Translation
L’Histoire
Blue Color Front Door
Breath
Louisiana Pines
Our Cadie
Shrimp to Fry
Bridge
Grand Isle/NOLA Girl
The First Happy Meal
Ruby Red Bird Lives
Suspended
Inside My Shell
Fantasy
Loss
Live Oak
Holy Stick
Dust
The Color Green
After the Flood-a letter to CNN
The Mother of All Cosmic Children
Heron
Ruby’s Wedding March
Paper Wings
Unbroken
Wanting
Standing
A Creation Story
When
History Bears Witness
*A borrowed line from Debra McDonald Bailey
* Cadie – The Mi’Kmaq word “cadie” describes the environment that provides every need for survival and sustenance.
The people in town talk about the weather as if they and only they can* as if worldwide humanity never pillaged or polluted their cadie* for centuries. Planet Earth groans with the weight of our species. Gaia begs for our attention from the actions of an overtaxed fiefdom. She rebels with every layer of her being, from cracking surfaces, to melting glaciers, to overflowing waterways. All the while, we wade deeper into denial. When hurricanes devastate our neighborhoods, we pay attention for a little while, then soon fall asleep as others around the globe awaken to their own disasters. Are any disasters truly natural or do we contribute to them all? What cataclysm will it take to wake us up to authentic empathy for our precious earthly home? History bears witness to the improbability of humanity waking, but perhaps future avatars will prevail. For hope to rest in my heart peacefully I must tell the stories –the stories of what we lost through neglect and abuse and especially those I am responsible for. I need the reckoning of a true confession to set me free.
Storytelling
The angels abandon me
When I sleep.
Maybe their absence finally woke me.
Because I heard the torturous
Keening of the earth.
Could I return to my original home
Without action
To heal the callousness of mankind?
I sat in silence for a hundred years.
When I first spoke,
It was through Gaia’s tears.
And that began the storytelling.
1
Lost in Translation
Born a healer
Traditions of a people long forgotten
Traiteur and traiteuse
Along bayous snaking Acadie
Rote prayers in triplicate
Only faith heals
Blessing or Curse?
Who can say?
The journey is too long
To make rash judgments
My voice seeks a different space
Inward, quiet, lighted, space
My original face –
The language of healing
Before it was lost in translation
2
L’histoire
* fais-dos-dos – a home spun dance usually held at night in someone’s home
* Isleños- immigrants to Louisiana from the Canary Islands
* belle marié- sweetheart bride
* Fichu- Cajun French meaning beyond hope, ruined, done for
Wood-pecking taps of leather shoes
On wooden floors
At the fais-dos-dos
Where my Isleño ancestor
Found his belle marié
He fell in love with that Cajun beauty
Eyes hidden behind gossamer veil
At the wedding of Antoine, the fur trapper.
The old wooden pew creaked as he turned
To see who sang the haunting hymn
With familiar dulcimer tones.
He recognized the sound of her.
As sure as the cotton was ready for harvest
And his labor harvesting pelts
For Jewish buyers in New Orleans
Would take him away for three months
Into the marsh,
Coming home,
He would smell of nutria, mink, otter, and muskrat
Too repulsive
Too late
To court her,
He knew
He was fichu.
3
Blue Collar Front Door
What did it mean to be considered middle class in the 1950’s?
My father owned a shipyard in Larose, Louisiana. He built wooden boats used by oystermen and shrimpers tailored to their specific needs and steel-hulled boats to carry supplies and crews to offshore drilling wells.
He built the house we lived in for 10 years which was a short distance from the shipyard on Ledet Lane in 1956. It had a formal living room decorated in fine wood paneling, a dark green, plush sofa, rough wood ceiling tiles painted a deep burgundy, and a large mahogany coffee table. It was kept in perfect order at all times. Every home I visited in that time along Bayou Lafourche seemed to have one of these unused rooms, some even had the furniture covered in plastic, presumably to keep its pristine condition. I imagine Dad showing his blueprints to potential customers and signing contracts there.
Our front door led into this room through a small foyer with a coat closet at the far end. The doorbell, when rung, was a chime that was so unfamiliar a sound that when it rang we all knew a stranger was at the door. My mother would take a moment to preen and ask us to be good. My brother and I waited behind the interior door listening with excitement and anticipation.
It was at this door that Mom greeted a World Book Encyclopedia salesman who sat with her in that special room. At the end of that week a whole new world opened up to all of us. She also agreed to buy (and I think this was the deal clincher for the salesman) a set of Children’s Bible Stories. My parents’ first language was French. My brother and I taught Mom the pronunciation of many English words while she read to us from the Bible stories she was so familiar with.
Even at the end of their lives, Mom and Dad would not have been considered educated or fluent in English. My parents were considered wealthy by the abject poor and blue collar by the wealthy. I suppose that made us middle class. I wonder though, if today a family’s description contained everything we had then, would they be considered middle class?
h
Breath
If a soul takes a single breath,
If it surpasses 100 years of breathing
Impossible to discern the
Totality of purpose in even one breath.
To engage life
Embrace suffering
Surrender is enough
How we spend each breath matters –
Fuel for souls
If it holds true
That butterfly wings
Across the globe
Form a storm
Off the Louisiana gulf coast –
Air Jesus breathed still circulates through us,
Then everything that has gone before
Through ancestral lineage
I inhale into the future
And exhale all that I am.
5
Louisiana Pines
Acres of standing pines
Sing a river song.
Gentle rolling highways
Near the toes of the Ozark foothills
Protestant Anglos
Live peacefully
And self-sufficiently
In rural woodlands.
On its most southern shore
Those who fish the salty waters
Sing a different song,
Chank-a-chank in a different language.
Mechanical pumps pound on gulf waters
Pulling oil from primordial depths
At the vanishing marshy toes of this boot-shaped state.
I pine for the old days
Before those sounds were known.
When pelicans filled the sky
Seagulls shouted joyful finds
Fish schools too vast to measure.
When Grand Isle’s shoreline
Not yet dotted with oil platforms,
Christmas tree lights, and natural gas torches
Reached thirty feet above the horizon,
The marshland covered itself
In vibrant colors of migrating flocks,
Wings slapped salty, humid air,
When my father and his father before
Had only one care –
That day’s catch.
Now, a scent of pine,
Caught on gentle breeze
I remember
My father told how
Plentiful our Cadie once was
Before Louisianians pined.
Add Tim’s GI night photo
6
Our Cadie
The earth stretches out of her shell,
Cracks open to let the light in,
Wields fire held deep between tectonic plates,
One projectile aimed at heaven.
Spawns humanity.
When its fire falls back to cracking skin,
Brandishing a mighty cleansing sword
The suffering begins.
Wings come first into the breech.
A dark angel or a saint?
She gathers all our transgressions.
Will we run in fear or welcome the destruction?
That angel flies but who or what will steer the flight?
Who will be the architects of the new design,
And who will be the builders,
Dreamers or survivors?
For thousands upon thousands
We have destroyed and rebuilt.
Never before or even now
Do we understand
This land we call home,
Our cadie.
How much is lost or
What can be gained?
7
Shrimp to Fry
*trier- Cajun French meaning to sort, pick out, select
Bayou Lafourche snakes
To the Gulf of Mexico
Where shrimp boats
Motor to and from
Catch to catch.
The Miss Renee, a lugger
Pulls the net that
Captures all manner of sea life.
My father hoists the full net
Empties it into the trier* box
Where the sorting begins.
I sort
Eels that slithered away
Crabs that walk sideways out of the box
I pick from the live shrimp
Sardines and other small fish
And throw them over the side
Some still able to swim to safety,
Most, already dead.
Squid we keep to fry later.
A sea turtle, drowned or crushed
Sadly, an infant dolphin.
Shrimpers are only interested in the shrimp,
Unless, for their supper,
In that day’s catch
Supplies a flounder or soft shell crab.
I come from a long, ancestral line,
Shrimpers, oystermen and trappers –
Hard-working men and women.
What I love is the ride,
Gliding on the water at sunrise
Returning at sunset
And the smells,
Seafood and diesel fuel in the salty, humid air.
Now I write about it.
I think I’m lazy but I have sweated
Over one elusive word
For hours, days, even years.
Still, I could not live the life
They chose
Nor they, mine.
8
Bridges
Long before the rotted main span fell into the pass
Between the Gulf of Mexico and Caminada Bay,
Wild horses ran free on the seven-mile island.
In an effort to tame their environment
Early settlers exiled their beauty and power to Grand Terre
Across the channel
A water bridge between lands destined to disappear
That gave shrimpers and cargo vessels
Access from the bay back into the gulf
How many since have come and gone
With intent to tame
The Gulf
This Island.
Its sands shift from east to west
And back again
Each year it diminishes
When tropical winds churn against the shore.
It remains
Naturally untamed.
The Old Grand Isle Bridge burned
Overnight by a careless fisherman,
A refuge for late night rendezvous
The place we released to the wind
Ashes of one I loved who died too young
The ghosts of drownings
In the water below, bridging losses
Joining us
–to keen
–to wail
Charred pieces of the bridge, now flotsam,
Deposit on the beach in the rhythmic, lapping waves
Like calcified remnants from the ashes
Of our lost friend
Taking a piece home as a keepsake
Memory into myth
9
Grand Isle/NOLA Girl
For Eileen
I come to recall—
to tell stories
Like old soldiers
Who long for a companion
Who remembers the shared horror
I come to lay my head down in the garden
Cultivated by love and sorrow
I come to rest my worries
And bless my future
With new memories –
Grown through shared laughter and tears
I come to know myself
Through her eyes—
her memories
That Grand Isle girl
Wandering oleander-trimmed lanes
And brown beach
Now NOLA girl
Host to country dwellers in her city home
The one who sees me—
All of me
And loves me still
10
The First Happy Meal
When I was a little girl, I loved bologna. My mother would fix sandwiches with it but I just liked to have a slice in my hand to snack on. I would take bites out of the center to make faces. It came with a red plastic coating that I would peel off, never breaking it. There was always some meat left on the perfect red circle. I had a space between my bottom front teeth that would scrape every morsel into my mouth. Then once I finished the snack, I had a toy. The plastic circle became a bracelet or the string for the game, Cat in the Cradle. I was so tiny then it could even be stretched over my head as a hair band. It gave new meaning to playing with your food. Having children myself I am sure that my mother was just grateful that I was being entertained with my own personal happy meal.
Something else that occurred to me later was that my mother was pinching pennies and gleaning time to do other duties by giving me bologna. It never occurred to me that bologna was economical. I just loved it.
In my mother’s era, swearing was never done at least not within earshot of a child. I remember being in our 1959 Chevy traveling on highway one heading south down Bayou Lafourche when a car suddenly pulled out in front of my mother and she shouted, “You hass!” Even as a youngster I had a pretty good vocabulary but I had never heard the word hass before or since. I chuckled silently because I knew my mother was actually calling the rude driver an ass.
One of the words that was usurped during that time to replace a swear word was bologna. “ You are full of bologna,” she would say. Since I did like being full of bologna, literally, it took me a while to figure out that she was calling someone a liar. Every time I heard her say it, I wanted some bologna. I wanted my happy meal. I wanted to be full of it.
Times have changed and if “shit” is the most offensive thing a child hears a parent say, that would be unusual, but if I told you that we could go back to those more innocent times, you would probably tell me I was full of bologna – it would still make me want some.
Bessie Senette is a native of southern Louisiana. She grew up along the bayous of Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes. Influenced by the astounding natural beauty and the insular, cultural traditions of this unique homeland, she writes to remember, to give homage, and to inspire others to do the same.
Senette is the author of Cutting the Clouds, A Bayou Mystic’s Poems, Musings, and Imaginings. She lives in Lafayette, Louisiana with her husband of 45 years.
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Of Course, John. It has been through a few edits. I will send here if I can figure out how.
Louisiana Pines
Acres of standing pines
Sing a river song.
Gentle rolling highways
Near the toes of the Ozark foothills
Protestant Anglos
Live peacefully
And self-sufficiently
In rural woodlands.
On its most southern shore
Those who fish the salty waters
Sing a different song,
Chank-a-chank in a different language.
Mechanical pumps pound on gulf waters
Pulling oil from primordial depths
At the vanishing marshy toes of this boot-shaped state.
I pine for the old days
Before those sounds were known.
When pelicans filled the sky
Seagulls shouted joyful finds
Fish schools too vast to measure.
When Grand Isle’s shoreline
Not yet dotted with oil platforms,
Christmas tree lights, and natural gas torches
Reached thirty feet above the horizon,
The marshland covered itself
In vibrant colors of migrating flocks,
Wings slapped salty, humid air,
When my father and his father before
Had only one care –
That day’s catch
Now, ascent of pine
Caught on a gentle breeze
I remember
My father told how
Plentiful our Cadie once was
Before Louisianians pined.
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