Yun Wang: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Yun Wang

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Yun Wang

Five Poems

Meditation on the Element: Water

The first rain poured from comets. A sea

enveloped the planet.

How did life begin?

Water chimes as I wade turquoise shallows.

What does the water in my body know, having ridden a comet

as planets hardened around the Sun?

How many times did the water in me rise as clouds

then rain over a changing landscape?

We quicken in birdsong summoning other birds.

Somewhere snow melts into waterfalls.

Why are we powerless to resist orchids

evolved to lure insects?

Waves join sky and earth. Whales sing

stories we have forgotten. Is someone listening

beyond the constellations?

Each stream meanders

across mountains and valleys

returning to the sea.

Meditation on the Element: Earth

When

did seeds of life

cross lightyears

to descend

into a water world?

How

did algae become plants?

Roots vein the land

seeking water, tips pulsing.

Leaves, intricate green

portals to light from a lonely star.

Why

did fish shimmy onto land?

The first lungs burned

inside tetrapods walking on fins.

Eyes open to night sky

dazzling with a river of stars.

Forests dream,

each grove a cathedral.

How does a nightingale hold power

over emperors?

Love, the incandescence

vanquishing the fear of death.

Earth floats in dark void,

a blue mirror

to a golden star.

Counterpoint to infinite space.

Communism and Star Trek

Both promise the same future:

“From each according to his ability,

to each according to his needs.”

Communism seeds bloody revolutions,

enthrones dictators with god complexes.

Star Trek inspires futuristic tech

snug in a uniform’s pocket.

The Milky Way harbors as many stars

as neurons in the human brain.

The Cultural Revolution banished professors

to remote villages, to be re-educated

by illiterate peasants. Old peasants felt

the Dao of Heaven demands kindness.

Their children enjoyed beating exiles.

My father was beaten daily by a thug

who occupied our ancestral house,

its windows carved with lotus flowers.

The Universe is accelerating its expansion.

What is this dark energy out there?

My father told me to explore the Universe,

to live long and prosper. Staying beyond

the communist retribution for people

with their heads in the clouds.

My progenies will pilot spaceships,

play the violin, and grow turnips.

A white lotus flower rises from black mud

to ponder cloudscapes reflected.

The future hums in our veins.

Gift from a Squirrel

A squirrel rips my glorious

sunflowers. Devours them.

Undeterred by the coating

of hot pepper spray.

Dry wind withers green portals.

A squirrel hangs limp

from the mouth of a coyote

loping into purple dusk.

The same one, or its mate?

Blue rainstorms weeks on end.

I am stunned by sunflowers

out of nowhere:

down by a wire fence

high on the weedy hillside.

Each a mini paradise on stilt.

Seeds buried by the squirrel

for a gray winter? Seeds trapped

in its fur as it feasted, to fall

when it romped in silver lupines?

Legend of Blue Bridge

Thatched huts. Bramble gate. Old woman weaving

hemp on a loom. Scholar Pei Hang passed

feeling urgent thirst, asked for water.

Men have long fantasized this place

hidden near the Blue Bridge Lodge.

The old woman summoned granddaughter

Cloud Flower, to bring water. In a clay bowl,

water sweet and refreshing. Pei drank, smitten:

Cloud Flower eclipsed the full moon.

Grandmother smiled, set him on a quest.

Pei searched the world, traded all he owned

for a jade pestle and mortar. Pounded herbs

for a hundred days. Married Cloud Flower.

Together they entered Jade Mountain

eventually ascending as immortals.

Born an immortal, Cloud Flower would water

anything. Grandmother would summon her

even for an ogre. He would drain the bowl.

Everything would vanish into thin air

unless he proves interesting enough.

Millennia earlier Wei Sheng drowned at another

Blue Bridge, hugging a post as the river rose

waiting for a woman who did not come.

Men have long insisted a woman’s chief asset

is beauty, enhanced only by immortality.

Pei Hang bowed deeply at the door

to the beyond. Could a smug mortal

hold on to immortal beauty free to flee?

Author Bio:

Yun Wang grew up in China reciting ancient poems, and began writing poetry at age twelve. She attended Tsinghua University to study physics at age sixteen, following her father’s advice to become someone needed regardless of the political climate. She came to the US for graduate school in cosmology in 1985, and is now a cosmologist at California Institute of Technology, working on NASA space missions to explore the Universe.

Yun Wang’s poetry books include “The Book of Mirrors” (Winner of the Twenty-Sixth White Pine Press Poetry Prize 2020), "The Book of Totality" (Salmon Poetry Press, 2015), and "The Book of Jade" (Winner of the 15th Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, Story Line Press, 2002). Her books of translation include "Dreaming of Fallen Blossoms: Tune Poems of Su Dong-Po" (White Pine Press, 2019), and Laozi’s “Dao De Jing” (co-translated with Li-Young Lee, W.W. Norton 2024).