Caltrain Honors Top Three Love Poets

A software consultant, an urban forestry advocate and a technical writer are the winners of a contest designed to elicit the best love poetry about Caltrain.

Caltrain Board Chairman Ken Yeager announced the awards during the rail agency’s monthly meeting today.

“Our judges read more than 300 poems and it was a very difficult task selecting just three winners,” Yeager said. “It’s great to see that our passengers are so passionately poetic about Caltrain.”

Joel Katz, a Silicon Valley computer consultant who is a member of the Palo Alto-based Waverley Writers’ Group and has published several poems, won first prize for a free-verse poem called “Until.”

The poem, which was inspired by what Katz saw one day from an upper-level Caltrain window, paints a vivid picture of a couple kissing on the station platform, which draws onlookers into the romantic moment. Katz, who is working on a book, said his son had read about the Caltrain contest and urged his poetry-writing dad to enter.

Of the train station vignette, Katz said, “There’s that scene and it sparks something in the imagination.” Placing first in the contest was “a nice confirmation,” he said.

Rhonda Berry, president and chief executive officer of Our City Forest, took second-place with a haiku inspired by a friend’s eight-year-old son named Evan, who is obsessed with trains.

Evan loves to visit Caltrain stations just to watch the trains go by, and savors any kind of gift Berry can find for him about trains. But “the-young-son-of-my-friend” was hard to squeeze into the syllabic strictures of the haiku form, so Berry asked Evan’s mother for a bit of poetic license so she could call him “my young son” in her prize-winning poem.

Berry says she also has a fondness for Caltrain because her father used to ride the then-Southern Pacific trains to Stanford. Between that experience and knowing Evan, “I did feel myself inspired when I wrote the poem.”

Christine Ng of Santa Clara won third prize for a free-verse poem called “Love on an Evening Platform.” The poem describes the romantic scene she witnessed one evening on a Baby Bullet train, of a man proposing marriage as his fiancé disembarked at San Jose Diridon station. People were waiting on the platform with cameras and everyone was clapping.

“I saw the love poetry competition and I thought, ‘Somebody has to know about this!’” Ng said. “I just couldn’t make that one up.”

Ng, who writes user manuals for a Mountain View medical products company called Omnicell, took poetry-writing classes at U.C. Berkeley and still writes poems.

Designed to honor the best love poetry about Caltrain, the contest was open to any and all variations on the theme of love and Caltrain, in any poetic form or style, limited to a maximum of 100 words.

From odes to Shakespearean sonnets, the entrants waxed poetic about subjects ranging from Caltrain’s Baby Bullet express trains, riding Caltrain to a baseball game, taking a trip with an elderly parent, or meeting a fellow traveler on the railroad to love.

Caltrain racked up more than 5,000 Web hits about the contest, which even attracted a few preschooler poets.

The winners were selected by a three-judge panel which included poet Cathy Barber, who teaches with the California Poets in the Schools program in San Mateo County; Rosemarie Perez, reading/language arts coordinator for curriculum services for the San Mateo County Office of Education; and financial consultant and Caltrain Citizens Advisory Committee Chair Sepi Richardson.

The first-prize was a two-night stay at the Pan Pacific Hotel in San Francisco, courtesy of the hotel; the second prize winner received two Gourmet Express five-course dinners on the Napa Valley Wine Train courtesy of the Wine Train; and the third-prize winner will sail on a Hornblower dinner cruise for two, courtesy of Hornblower Cruises & Events.

The winning poems are:

First prize, by Joel Katz

     UNTIL

     This train will not leave the station until
     the couple leaning against the white Camaro finish kissing
     O they have seduced the engineer’s gaze
     and nothing else matters right now
     not the stationmaster’s fluorescent tie
     or the fifteen crows gathering on the telephone wires above the track
     or a little girl on the station platform
     who jumps and shouts "Crow…crow crow crow!"
     till her mother looks up from Murder in Miami and giggles.

Second prize, by Rhonda Berry

     Can it be I've lost
     The dear heart of my young son?
     Mesmerizing trains.

Third prize, by Christine Ng

     LOVE ON AN EVENING PLATFORM

     Love in its simplest form.
     I see a man, wait for a woman,
     rain or shine,
     on the evening platform.

     Tonight seems like any other.
     As rain beads beat on windows,
     We pull into the Caltrain station.
     Wheels grinding tracks, I see
     red roses bouqueted, the man,
     diamond ring in hand, waiting
     as she descends from metal steps.
     As she sees him,
     her face is lit by joy and flashbulbs,
     amidst the wintry air, hot exhaust, and
     smiles of passengers, wielding
     yellow cameras.

     And in that moment --
     despite office weariness,
     we all see
     Love on the evening platform.

03/02/2006 - JRM