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2005+ site reborn December 2019

www.zenspacia2.co.uk
next texts only at ZX 77+ 
(Info pages top bar Haiku
composed in 2022-2023+)

 
Agnus Dei Qui 
(unus poema)

Walled sundial time is slower
than heart-beat clock time -

unum apricus post meridiem
sed mihi tristis tristis tristis!

Tempus fugit. Carpe alienus 
diem a tune in rapt sunlight

Agnus Dei qui tollis...calor
for     tristis Soror Jane
==================

PRE SUNDIAL COUPLETS
after Alexander Pope
ex. summer school 2019

Programming (after A. Pope)

Manners, deportment and proper
elocution need to be taught

Helen    

She swam into the heart of light
in an interior cavern

Visit Friedrichstein     

Beyond ruin, in the stable
block, a tack room with no bridle

The Vanished                    

All my great Editors are dead.
Alan Ross, Cookson, Martin Blyth

The Others Dead Young       

Sophie Hamilton, Fiona
Hobkirk, Joan my mother, Tessa

The Malayan Emergency          

Seconded to the Gurkhas, my
patrol father loved his kukri

Secular Society (for H. Bosch)

No grace, before eating: the pride
in gluttony before a fall

Dystopian Fall (after Spengler)

The advance of the zombie, fish-
eyed, lacking reason and language

At Duino Castle Trieste                 

My father, as the aide-de-camp
had my mother down from Vienna

West German English           

The cultured German has better
English than many a teacher

Trying To Find Lady Caroline      

Twenty years reaching Aquitaine
for her in the dunes, heading south

The '47 Travels Of 'Buster'    

Air-crated, Bombay to Paris
with India partitioning
 
In The Octagonal Chambers       

Who is alive down there? Rampage-
mad rats nip an operative

Alexander Pope 2              

After Horace, our first modern
poet. Master of the couplet

The Cutting Room                    

Lowell penned his dry 'Life Studies'
in heroic couplets, at first

On Pope Imitating Horace                 

You, sir, got him part-wrong: you lacked
a divan bed in Italy

Marina (for Abby S)                  

The yacht dipping gently off Maine,
a hand on the tiller, you glowed

For Countess Marie Larisch     

With a shower of rain; we stopped
in the colonnade, and went on

Chatham House 1          

I imagined antlers, a log
fire, a girl in corduroy

Chatham House 2                    

passing the port in her blue vest
and a confidential chamber

Blair's Major Error          

To try and eliminate core 
upper-middle class SOE

And, To Play (source: MOD)      

'his pop guitar on the sofa
 in Downing Street' whilst C-in-C

Last Lunch with Jean Stewart (MI7)

Mocked 'Obama on a sofa'
but doubted Brown as 'a gangster'

The Polish Cavalry (1939)           

Pilecki's horse, Bajka, was shot
dead from beneath him by Panzers

Shostakovitch (for Tippett)        

Stalin growling with Beria,
after Macbeth, he wrote the 5th

The Fittleworth Equivalent        

A strange, syncopated torment
and rebellion, in Elgar

Entrapment In Fittleworth         

A circling black helicopter,
a sports-car U-turn, Range Rover

Albionista Blair Dystopia                  

Each house fully wired, each car
tracked by a transponder bleeping

'Gentlemen And Players'                    

Wearing a tweed and twills, one would
scoff in a bar in St. Moritz

Cavalry Twills                                                 

Noting me in a pair of jeans,
my mother would order up twills

On Hampstead Heights   

Sunbathing on my favourite
tomb, a rectangle in the hills

At Monticello Mount           

Jefferson had the one copy
in America of Palladio

Sir Harold Acton Firenze 1970      

Lowell came to dinner last night
He wrote of a British fairy

Duino Castle 1947

My parents given a master
bedroom. Rilke walked a rampart

The Battle of The Arun Valley         

The many things happened; they think
the story can be denied

Jean Stewart on 60's Cambridge      

The invasion of cannabis
a KGB plot. She rang 5

Nikita Series 1             

The catastrophe to avert
is the invasion of Iraq

Chatham House 3                

Sir Richard Dearlove, it may be
time to pass the fireside port

The Basil Street Hotel          

In the old days, one might retire
to a room on the upper floor

Tales Of The Parrot Club          

They drank to ripe avocado
with imperial bravado

The Elitist Savage Lenin             

For, just the Communist five per
cent, who drove a stolen Rolls Royce

From Princess Paley (1916-1919)    

Lenin, driving our Embassy
Rolls Royce, was held up and carjacked
      
White Cliffs Of Dover             

Tired of the hanging gardens,
all that orchid beauty, sprinklers

Approaching Modern Kent            

On my last ferry journey back
I saw the pall of orange smog

Brechtian                                 

The resonant and ringing rhymes
the lyric voice of the people
             
Neo-Egyptian                            

The fangsterati, blood dripping
from their talons, plan a new heist

Chinese Whisper Land    

Speak of the wrong opinion
taken away in a wagon

Morning Glory (for Alison)     

Our campanula, a riot
of light purple cinquefoil

Lumpenproletariat                    

They snack on a sofa all day
watching their wide-screen TV play

Literate Remaining                       

Beyond the gravel, jittery
beyond repair, the mind-scrambled

Banned Patrician (for Hurd)      

The clipped tone of authority
to rule can no longer be heard

Catholic Hegemony              

Once, every Church in the land
was Roman Catholic. Pre break

Recusant Rule                  

We demand a Parish Vespers
for everyone, after school

The Virgin Mary (Ash Wednesday) 

Stared at for a quarter hour
she can appear to be alive

The Dunciad Gang (after Pope)      

They race to the bottom, culting
failure and mediocrity

Brecht: The Last Summer            

You cannot have a land with just
workers and peasants, the man said

The White-Painted Cell       

All very neat and orderly
the cell painted for the Stasi

Pietist                                  

There, an unshackled prisoner
might kneel and pray with Luther

The Period Line                

Amnesia in Brandenburg
is leaching the mausoleum

The Church v. The Wall (1989) 

High in a spire, a preacher
did evoke God as the teacher

Denounced To The Card Index   

A whisper anger, born of hate
in a neighbour could penetrate

Wychwood In Die Walde   

Walking a path long after dark
I can hear the crunch of snails

The Former East Germany     

Well: MI7 thought the old G-
DR 'kept the lid on the place'

Survivor Hermetic                        

Marry young, and trust the girl
and sleep-talk will not betray you

Ex. Ostpreussen                   

Countess Marion von Doenhoff
6. Unesco her Friedrichstein

Ex. Huchel On Der Treck         

Nearing a cold village, the sound
of tethered dogs a howling wall

Formerly Prussian Baroque                

Schloss Finkenstein und Schlobitten;
Schlodien. The Rot Red Army

In 1947: By Evelyn Bark        

B.R.C.S. Joan was ordered
to Pomerania, a Countess

Evelyn Bark CMG OBE               

Had an office in Kensington
and instructed my mother there

Attached To The BAOR                      

Joan's favourite health spa was Baden-
Baden, which they went to often

My Parent's Travel Otherwise            

Monchengladbach to Hannover
then to Munster, in the Vanguard

At 20 Bergertorwall Herford        

Their cross cook remained a Nazi.
I had a gaunt English pramster

In Her Last Week      

The happiest time, my mother
said was, though, out in Malaya

Sandy High Garden Terrace           

Evening primrose, forget-me-nots
became her view of The South Downs

Lemons Against Scurvy        

Much of Sicily a lemon
orchard, for The Royal Navy

After Stalingrad, Manstein     

Saner Goebbels with Ribbentrop
asked Hitler to pax with Stalin

France In Part Saved    

By colonial militia
landing on the Riviera

Autumn Couplets                       

A dull sky today, and a pair
of yellow-green leaves on the path

Where is Lady Caroline?           

Well, she cannot be on the beach
in Biarritz, slim and sun-toned

For Caroline St. Claire-              

What Chateau are you in tonight?
I imagine your bedchamber

The Sun King At Versailles         

The Mortemart women amused:
'their lazy, languishing voices'

Windsor Forest v. Canto IV        

Really, Ezra Pound, such a debt
to Pope, and his the greater work

Banned Albion Writer            

Banned from the big print media
and from a BBC screening

The Couplets                            

They, designed for the TV screen
and a round table on Newsnight

Digital Daze                             

Or, should one say haze? and people
are living in their toxic smog

Sacred Artificial Intelligence     

The Holy Communion wafer
is Jesus Christ, The Lamb of God

Anglo-Saxon Ditty                  

Rome ist Roma, Romana-burg
sunne aefre of die Mynster

Brim-fugel (Sea-bird)                

Brim-fugel, brim-cald in brim-bliss
haefst bitter breostceare, cald

Christendom                                    

ist cristen-dom and cristen.
God ist god; palm-twig, passion, Crist.

Haerfest Sang                               

Somor sunne for sunn-beam and sun-
bearo, to rip and rip-tima

Ides (Girl) for Alison                    

Eall-wealdend, eall-gylden
die ides of die gred and die grene

Mondeo Man                           

Where in the world does he live?
tied to the diurnal, neon

Mondeo Man 2                           

Before him came Volkswagen man
pioneered by Hitler for 'bahn

Mondeo Men                       

Miniature, stand for nothing
but the uncool Neanderthal

Jean Stewart On May 1940         

I walked through the men of Dunkirk
bled at Victoria Station

BBC Censorship           

Here, a Catholic denial
of sodomy: denied by all
    
November 11th 2019 or, 11 11
============================
all composed by Christopher Truman who has
the persona of a Lord Rokeby on Facebook
and/or The Ornamental Hermit (c. the 18th c.)
for www.sundialzen.com and eventual storage
on Jpeg image files for future generations

=======================

     SUNDIAL TEXT
     EVOCATIONS

Vinegar Vignette

No elbows on the table
or sloping arms, bronzed marching

Combatant

White-plated rhodium
she loved the odium
living in The Fourth Reich.
I said, no: The Fifth Reich 

and the half-track as large
by the flagged podium
to a smart pounding band

The Combed Spun Plumage

will be as fine as that of a pheasant
sunning on the Dome of The Trinity.
Below, the ashen peasant kneeling

Lyric

Her golden hair
a blonde breeze
(sunlit temple)
her lips, a peach
a rivulet
in Sicily:
blood orange
tongue sinewy
lemon olives

At Selinunte

remembering the carnage
of the Punic Wars, grappling
and red dismembering
to the fate of Carthage, I saw
the march of the elephants
and the death of monuments

The Blooded Sheet

Cherry picking, a fruit too far
in the grove of the marauder

the broad balcony of his villa
above the dusty village square

     Inauguration Day 2060

Horseman, interred in the statue!
and carbonised. The Republic
summons to lit screens green 
underground (written on the hoof)
on an epic inauguration day
for a much later President Ike.
Snow is falling like a fatal ash
and the hunger games are over
in too many a wired province.
The disfigured, barbed to caves,
prefiguring a genetic late DNA
disorder are sent to quarantine
by those still able to ration night
from day and find love in the stars.

Dark the 'Cyclonic zero of the Word'

The Quadriga

For the bridles charging ost
sky widening above the chariot
to an epic proportion

blitzed blue in a Preussen mania
despite the cornflower

Deep South Fan

Bourbon in the back porch
afloat on jagged rocks
beats camomile on the lawn
and it is a long way
whistling, to New Orleans

The soldiers had to march
to a drumming, drumming

Umbra, Carpe Diem

The golden evening sunlight
failing on tatty dry leaves
and scaly tree-trunk, given a glow
could be from an Ode by Horace

lamenting a passing, the dawn
like golden-stone maybe the last

Ut Pictura Poesis

'As with the painter's work,
so with the poet's' wrote Horace
and 'Concordia discors'

Atque inter silvas Academi
quaerere verum. Vita summam
brevis. O magna Carthago!

In Schlesien or, Silesia

A curvy figurine, her pert breasts
scorched in the spring of rapine
and pillage, sashays blackened
by a mown carriage drive verge
and now, a summer grandeur lawn
open with two banded deck chairs
ready as for a county tea in England
opens you into a novel by V. Woolf
yet, here you are far away in Silesia
and in a late afternoon laurel shade
they linger and bark, like ravenous
stray dogs and there can be amnesia
in a sunlit Poland and East Germany.
Where is lithe cartwheeling Sashen?
Was she born in Austria-Hungary?
A terrible beauty, and flaking roses
and you wonder: was there croquet
ever, on the lawn, to Earl Grey tea?

Ypres Wipers Ypres Jeepers Creepers

Dulce decorum...The futility of war?
With all Flanders taken, the enemy
Siege Guns could be firing on Kent,
our merchant shipping in the Channel.
The Krupp 'Lange Max' gun can fire
an HE shell up to thirty-five miles,
and thus threaten The Port of London

At The Menin Gate

They trumpet for eternity
at eight every evening
the coffered vault echoing

to the summit of heaven,
with every angel listening

Again At Duino Castle Trieste

At the long war's end, my father
became aide-de-camp to General
Airey at our Duino Castle
where Rilke had walked the parapet
composing a wrought Elegy
and they both studied Tito
the Marshal threatening Stalin
with Yugoslavia. Earlier,

in British Military Intelligence,
examining a ruined villa
my father found an Italian girl
in hiding in the basement.
They embarked on a love affair
and she even came out to Malaya

My Father, Dick

Both of his parents dead, their mansion
'Thornthwaite' in Shanghai long gone
to hoodlums playing billiards
in his father Regie's favourite room
when not entertaining in the dining
room, on an elaborate scale
for The International Settlement

saw his adored 'spy' sister Nancy
found dead one morning by her cook
in World War Two, after playing tennis
the day before near to Fleet Lido
with an Officer or three in Hampshire
at her Brook Cottage, her cause of death
uncertain, and then subject to inquiry;

my sad father, rather alone, had but
his one sister Kit, working at Blenheim
in league with Bletchley Park, filing
as one from a 'reliable' background
and his brother Hugh could not be found

My Shanghai Trust 'Aunt Kit'

who loved her dog 'Buster' so
later went living in partitioning 
India, until forced back home
to her dividends in Hampshire
with Digby, who later left her
for one Sharon of Basildon
then a boat pram in the hall;
Digby worked in advertising
alcoholic with a head wound
though rejected by every Officer
in his old Anglo-Indian Army
Cavalry Regiment, and Sharon
was his sexy secretary living low
in cute Basildon, Essex; Kit
cried for a month at Brookside
after his unwelcome departure
but in bed, she had never tried.
My father and Kit went to see her

What Of Electric Blue

Basildon Bond writing paper?
What of an oral by Sharon,
Catullus, and was Kit with Lesbia?
and terrified of childbirth, yes

The Shuttleworths India 1947

Major Digby Shuttleworth MC
King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry
owned a bungalow in Deolali.
Did they, once back home, go doolally?
and spent every Saturday beagling.
Their ship left India from Bombay

Divorced Fiddlers Green

The Guardian Royal Exchange
would keep Kit in clover
many lonely years later,
estranged far from Shanghai
lamenting the loss of Nancy

Joan Barbed

She detested, outright
the lounge lizard, the pansy
and no doubt thought
cottaging to be a flogging
matter, so to speak
and laughed at 'the hippy'.

She offered me a one-way
ticket to New Zealand

The 100 Club London

With my Godmother Katherine Studd
Kit's preferred Night Club, from '42
was The Feldman Jazz Club, just opened
in a deep basement in Oxford Street.
Their promotional jingle ran thus:

Forget the Doodle bug-
Come and Jitterbug-
At the Feldman Club

soon a haunt of the American 
GI, and the affluent Officer.
She tried not to get the last train back.
The Club did not go the way

of the smarter Café de Paris
in Coventry Street, bombed in March 1941

Papyrus Scroll Delivery

The read poem is horizontal
but deep text online is vertical
though either at a slight angle.
Catullus can be a wall of Latin:
for Horace, the chariot road
for delivery to the Roman villa

President Macron

wants to reinvent a Franconia
incorporating Lotharingia
in a remembering of Verdun
as reparation from Preussen
with one Treasury, in Frankfurt

The Jealous Reich

Of Toronto to New Delhi
and Hong Kong, which is why Berlin

Question For Oxford Union Debate

Should the practice of cottaging,
vile in the public convenience,
be made a criminal offence, again?
one might add. Oscar Wilde, a pink
threat to our vital Empire, which
saved Europe from Nazi Germany
deserved to be punished. The sub-text.
In this respect, I stand with V. Putin
rather than the former PM, Cameron

A Second Coming (In 587)

A salmon-pink dawn, and I think
of St. Augustine approaching Kent
to land on the Isle of Thanet
and proceed to Canterbury, a mission
initiated by Pope Gregory.
The Roman liturgy was in Latin

Variants For Alison

Ides (Girl)  

Eall-wealdend, eall-gylden
se ides of se grain ond sie grene

From Low German or Low Saxon
out of Old Saxon near Hamburg
though the Weald is part-Sussex
and the girl Saschen has flaxen
hair, and, she, named after Saxony
butter-yellow and sunlit golden...
I am writing in Middlesex

Brim-fugel (Seagull)

Brim-fugel, brim-cald in brim-bliss
haefst bitre breost-cearo, ceald

Variants for Alison 2

Haerfest Rip Sang

Somor sunne for sunn-beam ond sun-
bearo, to rip ond rip-tima

Medo-heall Medo (Mead)

Se wudu-fugel in se weald
haefst song for se ceorl drincan

Seaxe Hus

G-timbrian mid bolttimber
for aeppeltun, blostm, bloma

Bleo Heofon

A dun-land se lamb, wudu-rose
in sceo und heafonbeacon

Albion Catastrophe 2020+

The lying political class brain dead
for a drear people largely unread
rarely wanting to get out of bed
and the starving many go unfed
a multitude paralysed with dread
to the sound of dark wings overhead
leaving rats to do the unexpected
running riot where most fear to tread
in a land with far too many ill-bred

The Normans

Where are The Normans, to re-order?
and for A Fourth Coming of Rome.
They, who rescued us from the Saxon
and brought us the Romanesque arch 

Mansion Report

Admiring the weather with Lady
Bingham, the red-eyed scavengers off
her tennis court, sunny with scudding
cumuli, a clothed statue blowing
a pan pipe or horn, we went indoors
to hear a secret harpsichord keyed
for the few in an ochre-dun room
by bare Bach, a Louis Marchand

Brandenburg Jingle Jangle

Her harpsichord was of a batch
once pleasuring the King of Prussia
in 1769, over time
with a unique plectrum sonority.
He much wanted to conquer Saxony

after Silesia, his Bavaria, for which
Prussia had to win a third war
and defeat the whorl of Vienna

In July 1866

Prussia, armed with a faster loading
rifle, at The Battle of Koniggratz
beat Austria and Saxony
in one day. Forty thousand died
despite the Austrian cavalry.
Prussia won control of Germania

a torch passed from Vienna to Berlin
deciding the fate of Europa. Did
they laugh in the clubs of London?
when not worrying about India

The Radetzky March

To be a honed cavalry officer
mounted, the smart way of life
at The Empire's very frontier;
and the novels of Joseph Roth

Club Talk

There may be another Mutiny
and a further Lucknow. We may
need to order troops for Calcutta
in a tremendous hurry. We need

a submarine telegraph cable route
Bombay-Aden-Suez, for the 1870
British-Indian Cable on to Malta
and then to Gibraltar for Cornwall
beneath the hazardous Bay of Biscay

In July 1870

The Viceroy of India, being at Simla
for the summer, linked by telegraph
with the President of the USA
a message taking but forty minutes.

Lord Mayo engaged with his wife
in Piccadilly London in nine minutes
from the Himalayas in our hot Raj
after a laying of the submarine cable

making it easier to guide Singapore

The Law of St. Dominic's

Albion is still a Province of Rome
(Shakespeare, a closet Catholick)

Mynster Maesse

Se halga gast a se altare,
Anticrist hel-dor. Wundor

Ende
=========================================          
 
                                 
Christopher Truman and sundial zen

His work has principally be seen as creating Zen narratives, loci or aids for meditation, a metaphysical 'storyboard' even. Finding a zen at Selinunte, Cathay can venn the neo-Platonic. In a group of prints, he mediates certain motifs in Vermeer; with another, creates a parallel parallel world to explore. A virtual infinity is quested.


Christopher Truman started his groups of prints with experimental Image Text arrays. The work now lives much in counterpoint to his poetry, reflective of many journeys