Refocusing

for Jacinda Ardern

With seven billion people on the planet,
it’s sad that we’re bombarded in the news
with pictures of a politician bandit
who daily seems to get a zillion views.
It’s gotten to the point where I can’t stand it,
and possibly it’s driven some to booze,
yet while we’re flooded with shots of this man, it
helps to focus on the pics we choose.
Like pictures of a woman who has led
in ways that aren’t divisive but that fuse,
uniting, mending awful wounds that bled,
not inflaming, like he has, old feuds.
The world will never change through hocus-pocus
but may the more we learn to change our focus.

Jacinda Ardern photographed for Vogue’s March 2018 issue in which she was hailed
as ‘unabashedly liberal’. Photograph: Derek Henderson/VOGUE

Mario A. Pita