Smrt Lernins

An refresher exercise in iambic and trochaic meters:

Seasons

A winter morning is a pretty sight
A snowman winking in the freezing cold
A newborn year is starting in the spring,
a garden growing full of healthy fruits
A summer noonday simmering bright and hot
A freezing pool is crowded cold and blue
The autumn time has leaves all red and bright
The benefit of seasons is the fun

[Unnamed Poem]

Evil rising on the horizon
Arrows whizzing through the air
Swords are clashing; heads are bashing
over something very rare.
This is chaos, causing slaughter
Death is spreading like a tear
He is lying. She went flying.
Whoa! Here it comes: A BEAR!

The last one’s ending caught me by surprise and made me laugh like crazy. “That’s the PUNCHLINE!” he said.

When asked to correct some minor grammar and punctuation errors, Captain Science instead chose to completely rewrite his story. Unfortunately, this resulted in it no longer fulfilling the requirements of the assignment, so he is now working on draft #3. As you can see, version two is as bizarre as version one, of not more so.

Once upon a time, there was a nice town, and nice people lived in this town, but they had been cursed by a wizard, so they couldn’t speak any adjectives. As a result, their sentences were dull. One day, a spy who worked for the wizard noticed two men talking…about his master! The first man said, “The king will surely like when I deliver the culprit.” The second man said, “He certainly will.” Then a third voice said, “Listen up, both of you! Your wretched town will never survive with my spied lurking in every corner!” The spy’s eyes widened. The third voice belonged to his master. He then hurried off to prepare for a siege.

Captain Science’s grammar work today was to choose one word from a list of choices for each part of speech, use those words to write one sentence, and then use that sentence to start a story. I had some trouble getting him to actually use all the parts of speech, and as you can see, he played a little fast and loose with the interjections, but I found his story to be…well, ok, I found it to be absolutely absurd.

Once, there was a nice town, and nice people lived in this town, but one day, they were suddenly cursed so they couldn’t say interjections like “yes” and “no.” One day, a spy was spying when he saw two men talking. The first man was saying, “…the lord will not be pleased–.” The second man interrupted with, “not you!” since he couldn’t say “no!” “Besides–” he added, but he couldn’t say any more since he couldn’t say “Why you?” “FINE!” shouted the first man, “forget it.” “Whew!” said the second man. “Let’s race to the park,” he added, and they took off. “I like the second man,” said the spy. “He saved my master’s life.”