L - Beechwood

Summer was dying when time brought me there
Autumn hung chill like a ghost in the air
The edge of the sky was flecked with red
The clouds turned grey and heavy like lead
Its brick shone bright like a shard of the sun
Cast down from the sky and forged by someone
Into bricks and mortar and windows of gold
And walls so thick as to frighten the cold.
When I arrived I was young and unknown
Small, without friends, tired and alone
I shivered at the dark hunched within those bright walls
I jumped at the echoes that filled its cold halls
But I wandered its lands, its fields of wheat
That swayed in the breeze and rippled with heat
I was lost in its woods, the scented dark
The feathery leaves, the dew-spangled park
Where the sigh of the wind and the birds' soft twitter
The beat of my heart and the light's pale glitter
Was as one with the yearning blue of the sky
And the flutter of wings as my life flew by
By the time I left I was old and well-known
Adult, and free, and yearning for home
But the world had changed and seemed wrong to me
As we wound down the drive past a cedar tree
It was laiden with green, as tall as a mast
Like the trees that loomed in my distant past
But I knew if I touched its shaded bole
And strained for the hum of its wooden soul
There'd be nothing, just life and its broken dreams
No more forests of old, no more dusky beams.