The chicken had been tethered for days
Being fattened for Christmas
With a leg tied to a stool in the kitchen to prevent it from wandering too far
To save energy and line the muscle with fat
For stew
The chicken was fed with left-over kaunga, mealie, kwon, posho, cornmeal
It might have been fed with millet grain, sorghum, corn
Counting days down to Christmas
It spending hours sleeping with a head tucked into the wings
Cocking a funny eye towards the woman who minded the hearth
The occasional cluck, cluck, sometimes cluck?
The chicken rested for the days before Christmas
Tugging at its feathers, preening its multicolored coat
Not thinking about Christmas, not counting the days down
No imagining that on Christmas Eve
Some men, some men in camouflage, soldiers might descend into the village
Tearing the peace with gunshots and shouts
Tearing the peace with bayoneted AK47s
Barreling the women
The chicken never could have imagined that to speak no evil
The men might have cut the children’s lips off
To see no evil
Attempted to twist their heads off
The chicken never had a clue that Medusa was a man
A soldier, a soldier in camouflage
The chicken would never have known that a hundred and sixty nine times,
Two hundred and forty eight
Four hundred, eight hundred because at the hundreds, casualties are rounded off
Over nine hundred Congolese nationals
And their exact numbers no longer matter
No matter
No matter how much pain goes into the stifling of that one more life
With the peculiar angle with which the chicken looked at the woman at the hearth
When the men descended into the village
The chicken might have imagined they were from
Operation Lightning Thunder
Which was to flush out the bad people from amidst the Congolese
The men in the village, the men in camouflage might have been the bad people
That Operation Lightning Thunder was sent to flush out
From amidst the Congolese
The men, the soldiers in camouflage who shot and shouted
Then killed and dozed among the Congolese
Might have said who they were
But the Medusa never wanted anyone to speak evil
Or see evil
So they cut of the lips of the children
And tried to twist their heads off as well
So the chicken will never know who the men in camouflage were
If, by chance,
By that peculiar turn of the head
The chicken did identify the Medusa
It might have been just before one of them grabbed the chicken
Tethered to the stool in the kitchen
To be fattened for Christmas
And tore its head off
Let the spray of jugular blood into his throat
Wiped red into his face and held his bayoneted AK47 at the woman by the hearth
Who was going to discover for once and for all
That a knife at the end of the gun
Could go all the way into her body and make its way out again.
