First Poem: Warning Light Calling
Prelude
During the morning I improved my sense of orientation
in the city by taking a long walk along the inner boulevards.
~ Walter Benjamin.
Space. Sample. Love
I will tell the world about the demon who grabbed me
and who raged in anguish the thousands of planets.
Whole multitudes of young comrades were obsessed and infected,
and made prey to space soldiers and strange, unidentified birds—
I will tell the earth about that moment when poetry and love
made me go Sputnik.
Club Moscow in Aarhus
Yelena grabbed my harness,
I was afraid of her. She was
a woman of the night;
between the black iron
mountains, she had a glare
like sunflowers from
a forbidden spring.
I left my home space moon
for a parachute stretched
over the earthly sphere
like a huge pink canopy bed.
About Warning Light Calling
by Peter Graarup Westergaard
Dissident Soviet literature, it feels, has been living a reclusive life away from the literary mainstream. Warning Light Calling borrows ideas from dissident Soviet literature in order understand contemporary themes and motifs as the precariat, Covid-19, East and West, capitalism, healthcare, mental issues, the individual in a globalized world and the worrying climate crisis.
It is a little treat of fine literature that attempt at leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the world reader – as it seduces her or him into following those forgotten feelings of political Soviet pathos.
About Peter Graarup Westergaard
Peter Graarup Westergaard has published the poetry collection Nordvest (2017), also translated into English and Danish Northwest (2019).
He completed his MA in Comparative Literature at Aarhus University (2004) and holds a degree in English Literature also from Aarhus University (2015). He has also studied English Literature at Concordia University Montreal (2000-2001) and philosophy at Oxford University, Department of Continuing Education (2018-2020).
He teaches Danish, English and philosophy at a secondary boarding school in Denmark.