Faith In Language

Until I looked the words up,
I did not realise that the phrase
'super injunction' were so recent
in being coined, or by whom.

2006, and The Guardian, since you ask.

But I understood it straight away.
I had a long memory of living
as part of a family where explaining
to ourselves and each other
what we were doing
and why we had to do it
was an anathema, or at least
it would have been if they knew
what an anathema was.

Adopting religion, well a faith,
did not help the way I thought it would.
There I found not just taboo,
but taboo about taboo, until faith
in language became that difficult
I did not know what to.

Starting from scratch I kept the faith,
but with George Orwell as my guide
I decided that language has to be direct,
active not passive and what mattered
was being able to say who did what,
and when and why they did it.

To ask all this in faith meant that
I could at least have faith in language,
and maybe language could reflect
the life that I thought I was living.