Bay City News Service
A train rider heading to her Mountain View job witnessed a man propose to a woman on a Caltrain platform. The results of this inspiring scene ranked her among the top three love poets in this year’s Caltrain love poetry contest.
Judges had to read through more than 300 poems before finding three riders who were “passionately poetic about Caltrain,” according to Caltrain board chairman Ken Yeager.
Joe Katz, a Silicon Valley computer consultant, won first prize for a free-verse poem entitled “Until.” Katz says he was inspired to write the poem after he peered down from an upper-level platform at a station and saw a couple kissing on a lower-level platform.
Rhonda Berry, president and CEO of Our City Forest, finished in second place with her haiku about her 8-year-old son’s train-obsessed friend Evan.
Finishing in third place was Christine Ng of Santa Clara, who wrote a free-verse poem called “Love on an Evening Platform.” Ng wrote the poem after seeing a man propose marriage at the San Jose Diridon station, Caltrain reported.
“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 UC Berkeley and still writes poems. She won a Hornblower dinner cruise for two for her efforts. (Katz won a two-night stay at the Pan Pacific Hotel in Union Square, and Berry won two Gourmet Express five-course dinners aboard the Napa Valley Wine Train.)
According to Caltrain, as long as the poems were limited to 100 words and encompassed the themes of love and Caltrain they were accepted into the contest.
Love on an Evening Platform
by Christine Ng
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.
