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PoetryIn-e-Motion

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Poems and short stories ©   by Arno and Anna unless differently stated (Disclaimer).

Ever since my childhood, and even to this day, I always manage to get all bruised, black and blue. Everybody always laughed at me, asking where the hell I'd been, but I never could remember where I'd got them from. Funny thing is, as a kid I had to climb trees and crawl around to get them, now I don't need to do anything unusual and still I seem to get bruised.

Back then I was a wildchild. Searching for me in the garden or forest also meant looking up to the trees, not just scanning the ground. I was a master in climbing trees, running on all four, and diving. In fact, my mother called me a watermonster. Let me dive in the sea, lake or any pool, and you wouldn't get me out until I was close to hypothermia. Somehow I never broke one single bone.

There was one thing though, that scared me. Two terribly spoiled swans lived in the area of my grandparents' summer cottage. They were white, beautiful, and oh so greedy. Everybody in the area fed them breadcrumbs, and so their ego increased in proportion to the amount of delicacies they got. They would come swimming by when they heard someone was by the boats, and let out a terrible hiss. Hiss hiss, watch me! I'm here, I'm dangerous, and I'm hungry! But their beauty and tameness made us overlook bad manners, and so we ran, excited, to get crumbs from grandma. Sometimes they would get out of the water and approach us head high, hissing even more. I never figured out why, if it was to get more bread or to scare us away. Or maybe they were schizophrenics, one part wanted bread, and the other hating and fearing us humans from the depths of their souls?

Swimming on this side of the island was a dangerous thing to do. At least you had to be two, me and my sister, so both could keep watch for an approaching white clumb of feathers. We were even scared to think of a situation where we'd suddenly turn around and face a swanhead towering above us. They looked like they didn't hesitate to pick our eyes out if they were given the chance.

But fascination always overcomes fear. It was what kept me watching them, feeding them, counting their chicks and following their development each summer. Maybe there is also unconditional fascination, in addition to unconditional love? I always doubted that any emotion could be unconditional, but maybe it is just this uncaring-of-the-consequences - unconditional fascination that makes people do things that just don't make sense?