Seeker Magazine

Dorothy Bates

I started reading poetry at 13, all the best of that time: Cummings, Eliot, Pound, Frost, etc. Graduated from the Pasadena Playhouse School of the Theatre and worked in California and in New York where I've lived ever since. I have worked as Features Editor on Avant-Garde magazine, Assistant to the Copy Chief at Scientific American, have written articles for Avant-Garde and Sexology, studied with the great Lehman Engel in his composer's and lyricist's workshop at Broadcast Music, Inc., wrote special material for cabaret performers, and my songs have been performed in over 50 clubs in Manhattan and at Town Hall.
After taking training in Transcendental Meditation in 1972, I had a profound spiritual experience and after that, stopped going to regular bookstores and began to haunt the metaphysical ones. Read and read and read and meditated. I wanted to find my spiritual path, but Zen, Yoga, Sufism, etc., none of them called to me. Then, I found IT in Spiritual Science. Studied for three years at Spiritual Science Center of New York, which is a Western spiritual path or Mystery School that develops spiritual healers. Certified in 1987, I worked on the first Psychic telephone line in New York (yes, some of us are the real thing) and did over 11,000 readings. In the '90s I have served as a "listener" for the Spiritual Emergence Network and started a group for people experiencing extreme spiritual awakening (Kundalini).

I started writing poetry in 1994 and have been published in Rainbow City Express, Creations, Shared Transformation, The Lantern, The Edge, Barefoot Grass Journal, Crone Chronicles, Nomad's Choir, SEDONA Journal of Emergence, WHAT?, Wise Woman's Garden, Indigenous Fiction, and Sightings (Live Poets Society).

HERE AND HEREAFTER

Last night, reading a book about the afterlife,
you said that on that first, earth-like plane
we have the power to form
the paradise we most desire.
When first we wake, you told me,
thoughts are prayers.
With breath we take in joy;
love is the climate there.

Today, I planted seedlings in the sun,
sliced mushrooms into moons,
was midwife to some peas,
and watched the pear tree
rocking her pale, green children
in the breeze.

Tonight, sitting by the fire,
waiting for you to come home,
I thought about that paradise up there.
How does it begin?
Does some luminous being come in the night?
or a voice on heavenly air?
or do I look up to see you, at the door,
encircled in celestial light,
and suddenly know that I'm
already there?

SOUL MATE

He came into my body one night
when star-wires got crossed.
He gave me a vision of flowers
on a green stem.

Not in my room, but in my consciousness,
where the gods of Spring travel,
He unveiled a mystery.

He was my courtier
in the black infested swamp-time.
I had made no cry, but life had thrown me
far into the backwaters of the dying age.

As I lay drowning, his hand
touched my inner thigh
and a voice inside me whispered
I am here.

He came in the swamptime
He fed me from his milkskin
He showed me an altar
of dovewings and hawkfeathers
deep in the forest where moonlight governs.

How to pray at that altar?
I'll go on loving.

RING PASS NOT

The mind cannot
perceive the whole
till heart is plundered
by the soul

no peace prevails
no light is clear
till love dissolves
the bonds of fear

no voice is true
no vision pure
till we despair
and yet endure

no thirst is quenched
no hunger fed;
God will not see
or hear, or bless
until we feast
on sacred bread
and drink the wine
of consciousness.

OMISSION ON MARS

Science, with far-reaching eye
observes a planet in the sky
and scanning lifeless, barren land,
measures weather, wind and sand
but overlooks a trifling thing:
a few small shards of clay and stone
enclosed by pebbles in a ring--
remains of some unfinished game
beneath a patch of crimson shade
where once the Martian children played.

THE MYSTIC IN THE KITCHEN

Waiting patiently for the ritual to begin,
wrapped in her rough brown shawl,
she sits, placid, on plump haunches.

Sanctified with holy water,
dressed in a robe of silver,
she enters the crucible of fire.

In an hour her transformation is complete.

A great cross cut deep into her belly,
she is baptized with salt, sweet butter and chives.

"Take," she whispers,
"eat....this is my body."

TWA FLIGHT 800: AFTERWARD

What I remember is the humming of the engines
and drifting into sleep.
My bag slipped from my lap and I woke, reached for it,
but it wasn't there.
It seemed to have disappeared--with all my credit cards,
traveler's checks, identification, even my toothbrush!
The engines stopped.
Then, softly--words, whispering inside my head,
gentle, reassuring:

..... nothing to fear, said the voice
nothing can harm you now.
You have all left your bodies.....

In silence, the plane landed.
We walked down the long corridor into an open field.
People came toward us through the radiant air.
A woman who had been sitting near me on the flight
suddenly cried out: Mama!
....and then, my brother, killed in Vietnam,
came, smiling, to embrace me!

We come to you in your dreams,
in voices that whisper on the edge of sleep...
to tell you that there is no death!

.....do not look for us in the dark waters...
you will not find us there....

We have all arrived safely
in the City of Light.

(Copyright by Dorothy Bates, 1999 - No reproduction without express permission from the author)

Table of Contents

Letter to the Author:
Dorothy Bates at DBates3809@aol.com