Mule Team and Poster

Mule Team and Poster
Donald Justice
Page 203

I enjoyed this poem because it has a lot of detail and description but is still worded very nicely. It seems like Justice is at first describing some sort of old western town and its simplicity but by the third stanza the tone shifts darker. The poet starts describing the poster for a show and uses the disturbing image of "a terrible flap of brain" to describe how the poster's position on the wall. At the end of the poem it is noted that it was written about a photograph and it's interesting to see how the poet started with the photograph and it's image of two mules and ended up with a somewhat depressing poem about an abandoned town or something; the last line especially describes this: "a great scythe laid down there and forgotten." Another line I found pretty interesting is "the last shade in all of Alabama-". I'm not sure what this refers to but it caught my eye.