Scaling Back / by Brian Kunde

Scaling Back
by Brian Kunde

Our budgeters don’t sit the fence
In cutting costs; the stance is
That chopping limbs will save the tree,
And so we’re pruning branches.
The practice has its precedents
In lean times long gone by,
When former branches lacking the
Right champions would die.

There once were branches in the ’burbs
With holdings long since split up
’Twixt those whose books we now consign
Unto the few still lit up.
With each that falls the thought disturbs
Me, and I grow afraid
The next one cut might well be mine,
A ghost that won’t be laid.

For now they’re bleeding Downtown down,
And whisking Beech away—
A straightly necessary task
To keep afloat, they say.
Such tactics tend to bring a frown
To book lovers, who see
So truncated a trunk they ask
If it won’t hurt the tree.

But now the amputation’s done;
Still smarting, we are told
For operations to do good
It’s better to be bold.
Well, if they’ve finished with their fun,
We shouldn’t raise a stink,
For if some limbs are fire-wood,
The rest are safe — we think.

* * * * *

Scaling Back

from Bibliotec(hnic)a : Poems, Sep. 24, 2013.
An earlier version appeared in
SUL News Notes, v. 1, no. 45, Nov. 13, 1992,
as “Pruning Branches.”

1st web edition posted 5/15/2014.