“Unpaused Poems” by Alice Scott-Ferguson

Poetry is always personal, personal to the poet in the subject and expression and personal to the reader in the response and understanding. Unpaused Poems by Alice Scott-Ferguson exemplifies this. The poems explore hurt, hope, sadness and depression, celebration, friends, and theology. And they take readers on a journey of exploration, tugging us out of our comfort zones. 

Consider the sadness in the death of one’s father, yet discovering there’s also joy.

 

The Open Grave

 

Waves are lapping on the smooth white sands

   he so often strolled

on a day in the budding, promising month of May

   the first green blush on the fields he ploughed so often

He loved the sounds and smells of the living earth

   of the newly turned turf awaiting the seed

A small group of the people he loved

   huddle by the open grave on this May morning

 

We are bereft

 

The casket, the dirt waiting to receive the remains

   to cover him in the dark dirt of his island home

Then the larks—a pair of them soaring and sweeping—

   trill over the open grave

We lift our heads to see the song

   of a pair of birds, a pair of lovers reunited!

The light of heaven fills our sorrowing souls

   My mother and father together again

   after thirty long earthly years

 

Two images in this poem are particularly striking. First is the father’s love of the “living earth,”

newly turned to be planted with seed, and the dirt (also living earth) that will cover his grave. And second is the pair of birds, soaring overhead, an image of two people reuniting after a long separation of 30 years. The earth receives its seed, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, while the heavens express eternal love.

 

Alice Scott-Ferguson

All of the poems are personal. Some bring a smile – like when contrasting one’s perspective of a toothless smile when it’s expressed by a baby and when it’s expressed by a grandfather. Others reflect deep experience and prompt deep thought, like the gift of having a disabled child. Even the section on “Takes on Theology” are intensely personal, reflecting the personal experience of a miracle by Jesus, his final words on the cross, and seeking God in pain. 

 

Scott-Ferguson is the author of Pausing in the Passing Places: Poems, Mothers Can’t Be Everywhere, But God Is, Reconcilable Differences (co-author with Nancy Parker Brummett), and Little Women, Big God. She was educated as a nurse in Scotland, holds a B.S. degree in Health Services, and works primarily in the psychiatric field. She was also the founder of a women’s ministry in the U.K. She now lives in Arizona.

 

Unpaused Poems is what I might call a “somber delight,” surprising and informing in so many different ways. Scott-Ferguson looks at life with a practiced eye, and she finds the profound in the simple.