John Ciardi was an American poet, translator, and teacher whose work blends clarity, wit, and deep moral reflection. His poems are known for being accessible yet intellectually engaging, often exploring themes of life, death, faith, and human responsibility.One of the most striking qualities of Ciardi’s poetry is his conversational tone. He had a gift for speaking directly to readers, making complex ideas feel simple and relatable. His famous poem “A Box Comes Home” reflects on grief and loss, showing how ordinary moments can carry profound emotional weight.
Ciardi was also deeply interested in language itself. He believed poetry should communicate clearly, not hide behind obscure meanings. This belief made his work especially appealing to general readers, not just literary scholars.
In addition to his original poetry, he is widely respected for his translation of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. His translation is praised for preserving both the meaning and rhythm of the original Italian, making this classic work more accessible to modern audiences.
Overall, John Ciardi’s poems stand out for their honesty, clarity, and emotional depth. He reminds us that poetry doesn’t need to be complicated to be powerful—it just needs to speak truthfully about the human experience.
About the Teeth of Sharks
The thing about a shark is—teeth,
One row above, one row beneath.
Now take a close look. Do you find
It has another row behind?
Still closer—here, I’ll hold your hat:
Has it a third row behind that?
Now look in and...Look out! Oh my,
I’ll never know now! Well, goodbye.
Abundance
I
Once I had 1000 roses.
Literally 1000 roses.
I was working for a florist
back in the shambling ‘Thirties
when iced skids of 250 roses
sold for $2 at Faneuil Hall.
So for $8 I bought
1000 roses, 500
white and 500 red,
for Connie’s wedding to steadiness.
I strewed the church aisle whole
and the bride came walking
on roses, roses all the way:
The white roses and the red roses.
White for the bed we had shared.
Red for the bed she went to
from the abundance in her
to the fear in what she wanted.
The gift was not in the roses
but in the abundance of the roses.
To her
whose abundance had never wholly
been mine, and could never be his.
He had no gift of abundance in him
but only the penuries of sobriety.
A good steady clerk, most mortgageable,
returning in creaking shoes over
the white and the red roses. Returning
over the most flowering he would ever
touch, with the most flowering I
had ever touched. A feast of endings.
II
This morning I passed a pushcart
heaped with white carnations
as high as if there had fallen all night
one of those thick-flaked, slow, windless,
wondering snows that leave
shakos on fence posts, polar bears
in the hedges, caves in the light,
and a childhood on every sill.
Once, twice a year, partially,
and once, twice a lifetime, perfectly,
that snow falls. In which I ran
like a young wolf in its blood
leaping to snap the flower-flakes
clean from the air; their instant on the tongue
flat and almost dusty and not enough
to be cold. But as I ran, face-up,
mouth open, my cheeks burned
with tears and flower-melt,
and my lashes were fringed with gauze,
and my ears wore white piping.
There is no feast but energy. All men
know—have known and will remember
again and again—what food that is
for the running young wolf of the rare days
when shapes fall from the air
and may be had for the leaping.
Clean in the mouth of joy. Flat and dusty.
And how they are instantly nothing—
a commotion in the air and in the blood.
—And how they are endlessly all.
III
My father’s grave, the deepest cave I know,
was banked with snow and lilies. We stuck the dead flowers
into the snow banks dirty with sand
and trampled by digger’s boots.
The flowers, stiff and unbeckoning,
ripped from their wires in the wind
and blew their seasons out as snow
Purer than the snow itself. A last
abundance correcting our poverties.
I remember the feasts of my life,
their every flowing. I remember
the wolf all men remember in his blood.
I remember the air become
a feast of flowers. And remember
his last flowers whitening winter
in an imitation of possibility,
while we hunched black
in the dirtied place inside possibility
where the prayers soiled him.
If ever there was a man of abundances
he lies there flowerless
at that dirty center
whose wired flowers try and try
to make the winter clean again in air.
And fail. And leave me raging
as the young wolf grown
from his day’s play in abundance
to the ravening of recollection.
Creaking to penury over the flower-strew.
IV
This morning I passed a pushcart
heaped beyond possibility,
as when the sun begins again
after that long snow and the earth
is moonscaped and wonderlanded
and humped and haloed in the
light it makes: an angel
on every garbage can, a god
in every tree, that childhood
on every sill.—At a corner of the ordinary.
Where is she now? Instantly nothing.
A penury after flower-strew. Nothing.
A feast of glimpses. Not fact itself,
but an idea of the possible in the fact.
—And so the rare day comes: I was again
the young wolf trembling in his blood
at the profusions heaped and haloed
in their instant next to the ordinary.
And did not know myself what feast I kept
—till I said your name. At once all plenty was.
It is the words starve us, the act that feeds.
The air trembling with the white wicks
of its falling encloses us. To be
perfect, I suppose, we must be brief.
The long thing is to remember
imperfectly, dirtying with gratitude
the grave of abundance. O flower-banked,
air-dazzling, and abundant woman,
though the young wolf is dead, all men
know—have known and must remember—
You.
An Apartment with a View
I am in Rome, Vatican bells tolling
a windowful of God and Bernini.
My neighbor, the Pope, has died
and God overnight, has wept
black mantles over the sainted
stone age whose skirted shadows
flit through to the main cave.
I nurse a cold. It must be error
to sniffle in sight of holiness.
“Liquids,” the doctor said. He has
no cure, but since I have my choice,
I sip champagne. If I must sit
dropsical to Heaven, let me at least
be ritual to a living water.
In the crypt under the cave
the stone box in its stone row
has been marked for months now.
My neighbor knew where he was going.
I half suspect I, too, know,
and that it is nothing to sneeze at,
but am left to sneeze.
I drink my ritual Moët et Chandon
and wish (my taste being misformed
for the high authentic) I had
a California—a Korbel
or an Almaden. I like it “forward,”
as clerics of such matters say,
not schooled to greatness.
It is loud in Heaven today
and in the great stone school
my neighbor kept.
The alumni procession of saints
is forming for him. Bells
clobber the air with portents.
I sniffle and sneeze,
wad kleenex, and sip champagne,
trying to imagine what it might be
to take part in a greatness,
or even in the illusion
of something like. The experience
might deepen my character,
though I am already near
the bottom of it, among wads and butts
of what was once idea. And the last swallow
I do not like the after-taste, if that
is what I am tasting. But this is ritual.
I toast my neighbor: may he
find his glass, and may its after-taste
be all that he was schooled to.
Bees and Morning Glories
Morning glories, pale as a mist drying,
fade from the heat of the day, but already
hunchback bees in pirate pants and with peg-leg
hooks have found and are boarding them.
This could do for the sack of the imaginary
fleet. The raiders loot the galleons even as they
one by one vanish and leave still real
only what has been snatched out of the spell.
I’ve never seen bees more purposeful except
when the hive is threatened. They know
the good of it must be grabbed and hauled
before the whole feast wisps off.
They swarm in light and, fast, dive in,
then drone out, slow, their pantaloons heavy
with gold and sunlight. The line of them,
like thin smoke, wafts over the hedge.
And back again to find the fleet gone.
Well, they got this day’s good of it. Off
they cruise to what stays open longer.
Nothing green gives honey. And by now
you’d have to look twice to see more than green
where all those white sails trembled
when the world was misty and open
and the prize was there to be taken.
The Catalpa
The catalpa’s white week is ending there
in its corner of my yard. It has its arms full
of its own flowering now, but the least air
spills off a petal and a breeze lets fall
whole coronations. There is not much more
of what this is. Is every gladness quick?
That tree’s a nuisance, really. Long before
the summer’s out, its beans, long as a stick,
will start to shed. And every year one limb
cracks without falling off and hangs there dead
till I get up and risk my neck to trim
what it knows how to lose but not to shed.
I keep it only for this one white pass.
The end of June’s its garden; July, its Fall;
all else, the world remembering what it was
in the seven days of its visible miracle.
What should I keep if averages were all?
