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CARLO ROTELLA

Poet John Ciardi’s pearly bones

By Carlo Rotella

 |  Globe Correspondent  

  March 30, 2012

The poet John Ciardi, born at home in the crowded urban village of the North End and raised in Medford, a suburban promised land for Boston’s Italian Americans, died on this day in 1986. Death did not take him unprepared; he had been writing about it for decades. His “Elegy Just in Case,’’ which he wrote while serving as a B-29 gunner in the Pacific in 1945, begins, “Here lie Ciardi’s pearly bones/In their ripe organic mess./Jungle blown, his chromosomes/Breed to a new address.’’

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