From dappled sun, quick funneled in,
No obvious escape.
The path now focused, channeled, thin,
Towards a monstrous gape.

No warning spares the shock, surprise,
No early sight ahead.
The benign approach so slick belies,
The fate to which you're led.

A large black edifice decrees the way,
Inviting brave ingress.
Antithesis to the bright bound day,
A tomb no more; no less.

This surreptitious basking shark,
Commands that it be fed.
For its buccal cavern foreboding, dark,
Obstructs the way ahead.

Will fear forbid you now succumb,
To its dark, damp eerie gloom?
Your senses strained in vain to plumb,
This hindrance to resume.

Its curvature precludes the light,
Once beyond a point committed.
Entrance and exit, both out of sight,
By its subterfuge quick outwitted.

No indication of its bowel's length,
How long dark, light will vanquish.
To measure against your will or strength,
How long required to languish.

A cave and refuge along its walls,
Lends angst to steadfast flight.
Whilst distant sound around them coils,
To haunt uncanny night.

A chilling wind stirs stale dank air,
As if pushed by a train approaching.
A phantom trapped, to forever repair,
On the present day ever encroaching.

For with what rude eruptions of turbulent noise,
Would its chamber have daily resounded?
Whilst maintaining its constancy, dignity, poise,
That today it survives stolid, unbounded.

And what of those passengers brief caught in its hold,
Those glimpses of flickering life.
What myriad stories to its darkness brief told,
Of love, joy, grief, sorrow and strife?

What memories yet held, within its black stones,
And performances in them parading.
What appeal to the future their remembering intones,
Water's ingress what pleadings cascading?

Still now; but, for a hundred years,
This conduit was everyday used.
So important then, but now appears,
With only time's distant echo's infused.

All is now quiet of its past tribulations,
With cathedral-like silence run through.
Retired are the engines, the lines and the stations,
With purpose commissioned anew

Fixed modern lanterns try assuage an unease,
Earthly angels to lighten the way.
Seven stout sentries to comfort and please,
And forebodings to dimly allay.

Imaginings cinema with guide-lighted isle,
Mind's footage playing out on its screen.
The unwitting observer, here submits to its guile,
And projects their illusory scene.

But soon, this complete subterranean eclipse,
With each footstep now steadily resolves.
Dark's dominion light surely and stealthily strips,
As return of the day now evolves.

A glorious arch of bright safe relief,
Expands away black feebled fringes.
Behind slow retreating light's fugitive thief,
On which it deft and profoundly impinges.

A steady adjustment for dark-attuned eyes,
From confinement the prisoner released.
Horseshoe framing, lights true colour belies,
But resolved as with day glow increased.

You're left with a sense of a remnant of time,
An intangible hum of the past.
A Victorian story, its poetry and rhyme,
A romance which the fates spun to last.

And though some will fret at its dark cold embrace,
Fabled stories where tragedy befell.
The opposite seems true of this time-rendered space,
And a Dantean vision of hell.

A proverbial monster all toothless, benign,
Indifferent but anxious to share.
Its museum does past witness, with shadows define,
Hoping all will keen sense it and care.