London

London

On the banks of the restless Thames,
where iron‐clad ships dare kiss the sky,
the city drifts in mist‑shrouded breath,
a rust‑tinged prism of history and glass.

Big Ben, standing in minuted silence,
tells time not as a list of hours, but as a hymn –
a loud, slight chime that slices through the night,
a reminder that the heart of England still beats in stone.

Through the Tube's endless tunnels we crawl,
a network of breathing tubes that laughs at air,
running beneath the cobbles, beneath the squares,
sweeping London from the West End to Greenwich.

The markets – Westminster, Camden, Spitalfields – echo with
the chatter of stall‑keepers selling cloth, cheese and spice,
and every corner holds a narrative, a fable:
the old pubs where poets once sipped rose,
the cafés where thinkers drafted nations.

A smog‑curled street, the silhouette of a tower,
the distant silver of the Millennium Bridge arcing,
the echo of applause from a raucous football crowd –
all are part of the same orchestra.

London children splay on the riverbanks,
merry‑weathering rain‑battered puddles,
their laughter mixing with the call of baby cranes,
turbulent and gentle at once.

There is, in every stone and brick,
the jostle of names: Karl Marx, Shakespeare, Newton, and the subtle, soothing hum of a London bus bell dinged with the voices of a city that never falls silent.

We walk through the past, splany in the present, a living novel written in soot and concrete,
where the old and new murmur in whispered unity, and the city, bruised yet bright, offers every night a new chapter to be read.