Lowliest of Trees
(With apologies to A.E. Housman)
Lowliest of trees, the buckthorn shoot
is heaped with hoar on branch and root
and stands about the woodland thick
with dormant homes for pest and tick.
Now of my four score years save two,
full twenty-eight are nearly through,
and seventy-eight less twice fourteen
leaves fifty winters yet unseen.
And fifty years being too much time
to look at logs festooned with rime,
I’ll stay here in my cozy room
until the cherries start to bloom.
At age 14, C. Luke Soucy wrote 200 acrostic sonnets for the boy he liked, who remained unmoved. While he has since made a career as a classical translator and low-ranking university bureaucrat, the force of that early embarrassment kept him away from formal verse well into adulthood, when the combined tedium and delirium of COVID isolation drove him back into the arms of rhyme. Soucy’s blank verse translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was recently shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry; his rhyming anthology of queer Roman verse is forthcoming from Liveright in 2026.