I write poetry late at
night after my wife and the children have gone to bed. I teach English at a school that still
believes in grammar, at least as an exercise in logic, if not to help students
to learn how to write. Grammar
textbooks are deadly, their sentences bland like the food forced upon the
elderly in nursing homes, who also have no choice but to chew with however many
teeth they have left, swallow and digest.
So in the evening I
sometimes compose poems for my students, sometimes disguised as exercises, like
this one on the beauty of fall and the tenses of verbs.
Directions: In the following
sentences, underline the main verb (including any helpers) and identify
its tense by writing the name of the tense in the space above each
sentence.
1. The sunlight drifts
across the field on this cloudy day like smoke from a chimney.
2. The air has felt crisp
and cold all week.
3. I had tasted the same
crispness before in the freshness of apples.
4. The geese will fly
south for the winter in enormous wobbly V’s.
5. The squirrels have been
building huge nests in the tops of the oaks.
6. The walnuts dropped
from their branches onto the ancient tennis court.
7. By morning frost will
have covered the ground in the northern hills like powdered sugar on the
feathery crust of an apple turnover.
8. The leaves on the
maples are changing their colors from green to yellow and red and orange.
9. The frigid water on the lake was lapping against the edges of the old, wooden dock.
10. Mist will have risen
off the water like dreams gone to nest in the clouds.
~ Harper Follansbee
