autumn departing
after consideration
she pardons no-one
This was one of the best political haiku of the week, and one of the best of the whole election cycle. With so much speculation about who Biden will pardon at the end of his term, or Trump will pardon at the beginning of his, there can be a little doubt that the poet intends to allude to recent news cycles. But the political point is given a strong ecological inflection in this verbally playful poem. The middle line compresses several weeks of late autumn, as the temperatures go back and forth and the last leaves cling to the trees for as long as they can. But in the end, there can be no pardons in the world of the four seasons. For one must withdraw for the other to flourish. To my mind, this haiku offers a sober, if somewhat dissonant view on the differences between the human and the natural worlds.
—Clark Strand