Out in unrhymable Orange, I fell under many a Le Rayon Vert (1986) moment a.k.a. the half-death of bearing witness to natural sublimity in absolute solitude, which is as life-giving as it is ghostly. My being an alien species, or at least a visual anomaly, lent itself to over-compensatory kindness and also to comedy; cue me in the staff room simmering under the contemplation of a male nurse from Zimbabwe. Eventually, “….Saudi Arabia?” Egyptian-Palestinian. “AFRICAAA!” Medical speed-run for the morbidly curious: highlight = textbook conversion disorder in textbook schizoid who walked straight off the pages of Moby Dick; lowlight = child and adolescent ward where the formulation was ubiquitously, “This patient presents with severe suffering on the background of having a horrific life about which six years of medical school have equipped me to do absolutely nothing.” Between battling an actual food thief in the dormitory and being abandoned by my Sydney-side peers, I found time for beauty, and no time is wasted. I saw, I wrote, I got gastro and was conquered. My arrival caught the break of autumn. I left when everything everywhere was soaking in the amber suffusion, the slow dye of the season that gives the township its name.
The Life Aquatic
This was the world once.
Fainter Leaves to Further Seasons
Emily Dickinson bombshell alert: “Nature—sometimes sears a Sapling—/ Sometimes—scalps a Tree…./ We—who have the Souls—/ Die oftener.”
Pre-taxidermy
See: Ursula K. Le Guin’s short essay First Contact (2011), on talking to animals.
Ode to Tarkovsky
Solaris (1972) & Stalker (1979) copyright infringement incoming due to Tarkovsky’s monopoly on grass.
Goblin Market
No seriously read Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti.
Ozymandias
Sometimes, for a short time, we also live here.
Jumaana Abdu - Writer 
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