Poets Against War

		Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.

Olivia Macassey

31 years old

Olivia Macassey is an Auckland based poet who grew up in New Zealand's lush bush-clad Coromandel Peninsula. She was born in 1975. Her first collection of poems, Love In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, was published by Titus in 2005.

A cardigan.

A cardigan the colour of raspberries. Soft

  wool. You can tell it was hand-knitted

  from the way the fibres stand out

  in peach fuzz around it.

  Thick bands for small wrists

  and big old-fashioned buttons

  sewn on cross-wise,

  shining like boiled sweets.

My sister had one the same at that age

  babyish fingers

  need big buttons that

  they can clumsily do up.

  I could

       marshal statistics,


  ethical philosophies,

  politics and economies

  for my argument against war:

but really it's just a cardigan

  still on her, and the buttons still done up

  and covered by rubble

  and matted with blood.

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