A Grammar Exercise

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