"Betrayal" by Mantz Yorke in Eleventh Transmission

Betrayal

by Mantz Yorke

What loyalty made you leak material
declared classified or inappropriate
for all to know? Security necessitates
some silence, but what morality conceals

diplomacy sweetening deals with bribes,
contractors abusing human rights,
random shootings in a fury of revenge,
families blasted by misdirected bombs?

Your treatment on remand – ‘cruel and unusual’,
denied exercise, light, and sometimes clothes –
and a sentence as lengthy as a murderer’s
suggest the Eighth Amendment no longer holds.

Your match lit up dark closets of the state,
but who is the betrayer; who is the betrayed?

Biography
Mantz Yorke lives in Manchester, England. He is an award-winning poet
whose work has appeared in a number of print magazines, anthologies
and e-magazines in the UK, Ireland, Israel, Canada, the US, Australia and
Hong Kong.

Eleventh Transmission Projects

4 5 Poems: Reflection & Response

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