Beneath the sea, the train slips into shadow,
a vessel of murmur wrapped in motion.
threading two empires of thought and stone
London behind,
Paris ahead,
history pulsing in the dark between.

Above us, the English Channel stirs,
unaware of the weight we carry
not luggage,
but centuries of verse, of vision,
of the painted and the sung.
That train runs fast and faster,
The greens are disappearing both sides in a blink.
Thames and Seine bonded with art and culture,
love and affection of London – Paris.

London,
where the Thames glides slow with solemn pride,
its banks cradling the ghost of Blake,
his angels watching over soot and smoke.
Tennyson once stood tall there,
Laureate of crown and grief,
his odes echoing in the marble hush of Westminster.
Turner’s storms still burn across the canvas sky,
while the city folds its myths into stone and spire,
its bridges heavy with memory.

The tunnel comes
not absence,
but a breath held long beneath history’s weight.
The English Channel, a wonder of the world,
filled with miles to touch each coast
a bridge of silence,
a passage of dreams,
where steel and longing meet.

Paris rises, soft with light,
the Seine a ribbon of gold in afternoon hush.
The Louvre gleams with the hush of reverence
Mona Lisa’s quiet, endless gaze,
Leonardo’s sigh forever caught in oil and air.
Here, verse spilled from café tables,
Baudelaire’s decadent lilies,
Rimbaud’s revolts,
and Hugo’s granite grandeur,
each echoing through boulevards
like steps in the wet after-rain.

In Versailles once walked a stranger
whose name would alight in Bengal
Michael Madhusudan Dutt,
exiled, eloquent,
who carved epics in a borrowed tongue,
then gave it back transformed.
In marble gardens, he mourned his motherland,
his Duttabharati heart
Bridging Kopotakkho to Seine
with sonnet and sorrow,
East to West in measured meter.

Two cities not divided by sea,
But bound beneath it, stone clasping stone,
Poem clasping poem,
Madhusudan to Milton,
Turner to Monet,
London and Paris
a pair of eternal mirrors, in love with beauty,
in dialogue forever.

And we
we pass beneath that unspoken vow,
carried by steel,
by memory,
by the quiet rhythm of art continuing.