Rev. Joseph Williams is dead, and he is still talking. Frank Marshall Davis lets him speak from beyond the grave, and what he offers is not a confession but a defence, so smooth and so cheerfully shameless that the reader has to work to notice what he is admitting. The poem sketches a minister who has turned his own appetites into church policy. Its central idea is that the line between the sacred and the bodily is blurrier in practice than any pulpit would admit.
The argument is built as one long sentence with no punctuation at all. The first two stanzas are pure preparation, a chain of "Being…" and "realizing that…", each clause leaning on the last, until the main verb finally arrives in "you can understand." It is the shape of a man talking himself out of a corner. Every step seems logical as long as you don't ask where it is heading, and with no commas or full stops he never pauses to hear himself. Almost every line begins with "and," so the justifications pile up like a lawyer adding exhibits.
The diction does the comic work. The opening sets up two grand pairs, "Man of God" against "child of flesh and blood," and a "soul thirsting for truth" against a body "hungering." The verbs recall biblical language about hunger and thirst, which gives his words a holy glow. Then the grammar slips: "hungering for eat and drink." The verbs "eat" and "drink" stand where nouns should be, blunt and almost childish, and the lofty music collapses into a rumbling stomach. The soul gets the abstract noun, "truth." The body gets the plainest words in the stanza.
The second stanza turns his needs into administration. "Satisfaction," "depended," "survival," "preserving," "preservation": it is the vocabulary of committee minutes, and the repeated "preserv-" gives the church a faintly pantry-like sound, something to be kept sound and stocked. The key move comes in the inverted syntax of "and that on the sisters / depended such preservation." The word order holds the sisters back until the line break isolates them, and they become the hinge of the whole scheme. The church survives through them, and so does his body. The poem never says what the sisters supply. Food is the obvious answer, and the rest is left to implication until the last lines.
Those lines spring the trap. "Stuck together" sounds like loyalty, but it carries a mischievous undertone. "The sisters mourned" now reads on two levels, grief for a pastor and grief for a man they loved. Then comes the real reveal: "so many children / will likewise search for truth / and have moles on their necks." The word "truth" returns with its meaning changed. Earlier it was the preacher's lofty thirst, but now, judging by the context, it seems to be the children's search for where they come from. "Likewise" makes it an inheritance, with the appetite and the question passed down together with the birthmark. The mole is a wonderful choice of detail, small, physical, and impossible to explain away. His theology can be argued with, but his body leaves evidence.
Notice the tenses, too. "When I died" looks back, while "will likewise search" looks forward, so the speaker surveys his legacy from the grave. In the final line "I" disappears and he names himself in the third person, "the Rev. Joseph Williams," title and all, as if reading his own headstone. Even now he is polishing his dignity.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. The short lines follow the rhythm of speech, a man chatting rather than preaching. What music there is comes from paired phrases like "flesh and blood" and "eat and drink," which have the cadence of liturgy but are used to say something decidedly unliturgical.
The poem matters because it is satire that refuses to be simple. Williams is a hypocrite, yet the poem lets him make his case in a reasonable voice. Bodies do need feeding, congregations do need holding together, and the church does survive. The reader laughs, then winces, because the poem shows how self-interest can dress itself as principle. It also hints at a community that understood far more than it said.