Eight lines, but only five of them are different. That is the triolet's built-in trick, and in Squire's poem it becomes a trap. A woman watches the sun go down, draws a gun from her pocket, counts toward one, and the poem stops before we learn what she does.
The action is told in a few gestures. She watches the sunset. Her lover lies, or sits, perfectly still. The gun comes out, her hands shake, and she tries to harden her resolve. The line under the title, «blackmail | day 15 | triolet», looks like the label of a daily writing challenge, with a prompt word, a day number and a required form. That is an inference from the header, not something I can confirm. It would explain why "blackmail" never appears in the poem itself. We are never told who is squeezing whom, or what secret is at stake. The reader has to build the backstory, and the poem is more unsettling for refusing to supply it.
The triolet follows a strict pattern: the first line returns as lines four and seven, and the second line returns as the last. Here that repetition does the emotional work. When "she sees the sun sink past the horizon" first appears, it is quiet scene-setting. After the gun has come out, its return in line four sounds like a deadline. By line seven, after "steeling her will," the same words feel like a verdict waiting to be carried out. Nothing in the refrain has changed except what surrounds it. The closing line, "and how her lover seems so still," works the same way. The word "seems" matters. The lover might be asleep, calm, unsuspecting, or already past help, and each reading becomes more chilling once we have seen the gun. The stillness also matches the sun's slow sinking and the poem's own refusal to move forward.
The sound of the poem supports this. The first line runs to ten syllables, long and drawn out like the sunset it describes. The shortest line is "trembling, she counts down to one," at seven syllables, and the clipped rhythm makes the countdown feel hurried and nervous. Sibilance hushes the whole thing: sees, sun, sink, seems, so, still. It sounds like someone speaking under their breath.
The rhymes are slightly off in a way that suits the subject. "Still" and "will" rhyme cleanly, as do "gun" and "one." But "horizon," the word the refrain depends on, ends on an unstressed syllable, so it only half-rhymes with those two blunt, stressed words. The most-repeated line keeps almost fitting its slot without quite doing so. In a form that is supposed to feel tidy, that small wobble echoes her trembling.
Two details about the countdown and punctuation also matter. She counts down to "one," not zero, so the moment of action is never reached. The poem uses lowercase letters and almost no punctuation, and it has no closing full stop. Nothing is sealed off. The last line simply loops us back to the picture of the lover, as if the poem, like the woman, cannot get past this moment.
The poem's significance lies in how well form and content fit. A triolet circles back on itself, and a person who cannot bring herself to act does the same, going over the same sight, the same fear and the same decision. Squire never shows violence or explains the blackmail. The tension comes from delay, and the repeated lines make that delay something the reader feels as well as reads. For students, it shows how a tight constraint can create meaning instead of limiting it, and how much a poem can do by leaving out the event it seems to be building toward.