Discuss the theme of the anguish of living in a world divided by relentless conflict based on one or more poems by Celan, Ryuichi, Amichai, Darwish, Szymborska or Harjo from our reading list. What is/are the represented conflict(s) and reaction(s) to the conditions of conflict? The poems are Paul Celan's “Death Fugue,” Tamura Ryuichi's “October Poem,” Yehuda Amichai's "Sort of an Apocalypse" and "God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children," Wislawa Szymborska's “The Terrorist, He Watches,” and Mahmoud Darwish's "Identity Card."

Celan's "Death Fugue" addresses the theme of anguish caused by conflict and division from a very personal point of view. Celan was a Romanian Jew who, during the Second World War, was compelled by the Nazis to endure a forced labor camp. In this poem, Celan uses repetition—"Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime" and "we drink and drink"—to represent the relentless monotony of what he was forced to endure. The structure of the poem is at once cyclical and fragmentary, suggesting that existence felt confusing and surreal, almost dreamlike; the Jews in the poem are treated akin to animals, as the German "whistles his Jews" and commands them to dance. The image of the "black milk" occurs at all times of day, seeming to symbolize something rotten the Jews are forced to drink. Milk is so universally equated with whiteness that the image of "black milk" jars the reader, representing a world that is completely opposed to the way it should be. Similarly, the "snakes" cultivated by the unknown German man seem to have a demonic connotation, like the archetypal snake of Western cultural understanding. "Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland" is a phrase repeated over and over: Death is something dealt upon the Jews by their German commanders for reasons they do not understand.
Their situation is confused and surreal, and Celan leaves us with the final image of "your golden hair Margareta / your ashen hair Shulamite." Shulamite is the protagonist in the Song of Solomon, or a person from Shula, while Margareta appears to be the German commandant's girlfriend at home. The juxtaposition of these two lines at the end of the poem underlines the ultimate confusion felt by the speaker, as the two women seem to be both equated and opposed (one is dark, and the other is fair). Both Jews and Germans are only people, but the German's woman is "golden," while the Jewish woman is "ashen," as if bound for the fire.
In Celan's poem, the most compelling aspect of the speaker's anguish is in its endlessness, its repetitiveness, and the fact that he cannot understand either his own situation or how he came to be in it. The behavior of the people involved in this conflict makes no sense to him; the sheer senselessness of being asked to "scoop out a grave in the clouds" gives the entire circumstance a sense of being in a bad dream.