Holding Hands as She Exhales by Paul Squires

just before she dies
after three days at the hands
of u.s. trained torturers acting
for u.s. backed dictators
in the utter darkness of
one of Pinochet’s prisons
and the child inside of her
dies too…

perhaps there is a moment
where she is still alive and
the pain has stopped
long enough for her
to draw one breath
and she will realise
that she is not alone
nor forgotten,

,of course, that happened long ago
in not your country
to someone not you
and you were not there

so you may remain calm
and unaffected and believe
that this is just a poem
and not a holding of hands.


Paul Squires, Australia

(I was shocked to hear that Paul died on 28 July after an accidental fall. He was 46. In memory of a talented poet and entertaining blogger I'm reposting this poem of his which I first published here on 18 October 2007. )

Three-legged Dog With Omelette by Paul Squires

"What's for breakfast, Blue" (for a threelegged
dog tribute poem double self
portrait with hinge.. .
you can't make an omelette without
you see some of us were born to trouble
son when seeing flocks of sheep idly
graze on each others thoughts
in fantasy fields of gentle lies
agreed by some mere mutuality
can't help but bark and it's your
job, Blue, to get 'em moving in the other
direction, they're headin' for the gate, boy,
even it means the only friend left to
talk to is you, Blue,
he says,
melting butter and chopping garlic.



Paul Squires, Australia

The Writer As Libertine by Paul Squires

(A honeymoon waltz)

an idea like a decadent intoxicant whereby,
in character, one can discover
that armed with acoustical resonance, one
can conjure a silk future too
in which wigs and wit return us
to Versailles.

(after, with memories of eminence, I manifest
Caliban in a nightclub amid sprites, raging
Against Curs’d Fate which enslaved his witch mother
to the arrogant masteries of Prospero
and experiencing epyphynys
with dancers whose nakedness
hid a naked life.)

then Strauss in Vienna in August
as autumn turned in on itself and
under white lace décolletage
the masked ladies
soft skin touched by delicate ribbons of
sound, by the waltz and the sense of eternity
in the architecture, shivered,

the last age in which eminence was celebrated
gives way inevitably to a chaos
of hangovers in sunlit motel rooms
surrounded by bottles and two bodies strewn
in velvet dressing-gowns, ours,

Remind me again of the Russians,
The Hermitage, the tears which struck that marble floor, ours,
at one man’s slender
momentary
tenderness for his new wife,
in white marble, in the waltz,
etheria made eternal

thru violins in gypsy camps at night
since Europe is in decline,
again,
in Prague,

where finally, in a garden, we slept
glowing under chandeliers of stars.




Paul Squires, Australia