CREATIVE WRITING HONORS / II / III
Mr. Whitehead
1st Quarter: Prompt Two
Poem Written in Subjunctive Mood (Conditional)
The objective for this assignment is to write a poem in which you imagine hypothetically some
event—historical, mythical, biblical, fictional or real—and retell it, revealing something new.
The subjunctive mood expresses a suggestion, a requirement, or a desire, or it states a condition
that is contrary to fact (that is, imaginary or hypothetical). The subjunctive mood uses
distinctive verb forms.
 Suggestion or requirement: plain form with all subjects.
The manager asked the he donate money. [Suggestion]
Rules require that every donation be mailed. [Requirement]
 Desire or present condition contrary to fact: past tense; for be, the past tense were.
We wish that the theater had more money. [Desire]
It would be in better shape if it were better funded. [Present condition contrary to fact]
 Past condition contrary to fact: past perfect.
The theater could have been better funded if it had been better managed.
With conditions contrary to fact, the verb in the main clause also expresses the imaginary
or hypothetical with the helping verb could or would, as in the last two sample sentences
above. This is referred to as a conditional statement.
You can use Stephen Dunn’s poem “If a Clown” and my poems “Lot’s Wife” or “Ararat” as
examples.
If a Clown
If a clown came out of the woods,
a standard-looking clown with oversized
polka-dot clothes, floppy shoes,
a red, bulbous nose, and you saw him
on the edge of your property,
there’d be nothing funny about that,
would there? A bear might be preferable,
especially if black and berry-driven.
And if this clown began waving his hands
with those big white gloves
that clowns wear, and you realized
he wanted your attention, had something
apparently urgent to tell you,
would you pivot and run from him,
or stay put, as my friend did, who seemed
to understand here was a clown
who didn’t know where he was,
a clown without a context?
What could be sadder, my friend thought,
than a clown in need of a context?
If then the clown said to you
that he was on his way to a kid’s
birthday party, his car had broken down,
and he needed a ride, would you give
him one? Or would the connection
between the comic and the appalling,
as it pertained to clowns, be suddenly so clear
that you’d be paralyzed by it?
And if you were the clown, and my friend
hesitated, as he did, would you make
a sad face, and with an enormous finger
wipe away an imaginary tear? How far
would you trust your art? I can tell you
it worked. Most of the guests had gone
when my friend and the clown drove up,
and the family was angry. But the clown
twisted a balloon into the shape of a bird
and gave it to the kid, who smiled,
let it rise to the ceiling. If you were the kid,
the birthday boy, what from then on
would be your relationship with disappointment?
With joy? Whom would you blame or extoll?
Lot’s Wife
Sometime soon after the embers cooled,
after dust clouds settled; after the last strings
of smoke, hoisted by desert breezes, cleared the air,
they must have come, people of those three cities
remaining, to pick among the charred bones,
the rubble of what was once temple and house,
stable and brothel; to kick at stones; to tug
at handles of buckets, blades of shovels and spades.
Later, raising ash plumes in the scorched plain,
cloths at their mouths and noses, eyes burning,
neither fearful nor repentant but full of wonder,
full of the scavenger’s overabundant hope,
they would have found her—even as now
some men encounter the woman of their dreams
(beauty of the movie screen, princess they capture
with a camera’s flash, girl whose finger brushes theirs
when she takes their card at the market register)—
found her, that is, not as the person she was
but who they needed her to be, and, man or woman,
they each would have wanted a piece of her.
Standing in that wasted landscape,
she must have seemed a statue erected there
as a tribute to human frailty, white, crystallized,
her head turned back as if in longing to be the girl
she had been in the city she had known.
And they must have stood there, as we do,
a bit awestruck, taking her in for a time,
and then with chisel and knife, spike and buckle,
chipped at her violently and stuffed their leathern
pouches full of her common salt, salt with which
to season for a while their meat, their daily bread.