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dog and pony show · Dec 30, 2025

ode to the trite and true

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ringleader · dog and pony show

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My pops pushed me in the swing sometimes,
there at the tree line of my childhood backyard.
There's an occasion in particular he's never let me forget.
If I mention my writing today, he'll ask if I remember,
"That time I realized you were some kinda poet prodigy child,"
with an undivided sincerity that's worn my cringe down to a soft grin.
What was my kindergarten revelation
there at the tree line of my childhood backyard?
"Push me gently like a breeze blowing softly through my hair."
He was surprised in that moment in a way I didn't understand then.
It meant little to me but as good means of description.
"Sure son, when you put it like that what else can I do?" he laughed.
Oh, how the trite and true is the simplest pleasure we can know.
The aged simile that still cuts smiles in faces of stone,
the metaphor whose meaning with time has become all its own,
the adages and 'momma always saids' that punctuate our thoughts;
each one itself a story in so few syllables which are only lived, never bought.
Oh, how the trite and true is a summer day's gentle breeze on our life's walk.
I hold my newborn son in my arms,
and he smiles for the first time asleep in sweet dreams.
Is that his mother's nose or mine?
Before, I thought my heart would burst at its seams.
How could there be room to love him as much as his sibling?
But now I feel it beat, beat, beat steadily more steady than ever.
A toddler dangling from my ankle, as I pass the babe to his mother.
He's already a spitting image of his old man with brow furrowed over crows feet.
Who will this child be, and what ancient wisdom will he bequeath to me?
"Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me," saith the Lord Jesus.
"For of such is the kingdom of heaven."
Yes, the child is the father of man,
as the trite is the father of true.
Gustave Dore, The Nativity, 1880 A.D.

Read the original on dogandponyshow.substack.com

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