My name is Podraig Otuma and I'm fascinated by how different professions carry with them very different vocabularies.

I've got a friend who is a builder and he was saying to me that what he really wants to do is to write poems.

But I was saying to him, what an amazing resource and archive of vocabulary he'll have about building

that hardly any other poet would know how to include. Other friends of mine who work in law

have not only precise legal language, but also the approach to language that legal terminology

seems to imply that each sentence can only be understood

with one particular meaning,

which is almost like the antithesis to a poem

where you're hoping to write something

that can have multiple meanings.

Benjamin Zephaniah,

a great British poet who died in 2023,

was a poet in residence with a human rights barrister.

And he has written about a lot of horrific circumstances of murders of black people in London

and also then the failures of systems of governance, systems of policing, to respond properly

and adequately to that.

And what he does in some of these poems is incorporate legal language into the poetry,

like this poem to Michael Menson by Benjamin Zephaniah.

There must be some light somewhere. There must be a true other. There must be some light somewhere.

There must be a true other.

There must be more than despair.

There must be more, my brother.

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