Between Stars and Steel Fingers - Bebe Butler

Poetry, along with meditation, became a shovel I used to dig into soil I had ignored for so long... to unearth a beauty that had seemed elusive. There are three places from which the poems in this book bloomed... the first is the angst that comes from the distance between us, our ideals, and God. Prostrated with attempts at 'sanity-maintenance,' I put pen to paper, and one day 'The Way God Speaks' trickled out like a balm. Poetry has a way of speaking to us, of connecting us with some voice deep inside ourselves. The second launching pad for the poems was electricity. In her book, 'Poem Crazy,' Susan Goldsmith Woolbridge writes about how poems live in people, places, and things that have that electrical quality. When you feel that, you know something lovely or potent is waiting to be unearthed. Finding electricity is directly related to the purity and cleanliness of our minds, to our ability to be available to the moment and free of preconceived notions. That's shy innocence, an endless discovery. The third and final origin was a rekindling of beauty and tenderness that grew from a relationship with the Supreme Soul. It was this union that reawakened a lost ability to feel and opened my eyes to potential I once saw as dime-sized doors. These poems are about the heights of the spirit and the low grips of humanness. They are sixty or so dances between the doldrums and Divinity.