May Your Days Go by in Beauty & Wonder

May Your Days Go by in Beauty & Wonder Toi Derricotte (bio) I write on a friend’s birthday card; & then, I find on my mom’s Begonia, for the first time since her death, a pale purplish flower straining toward light. It’s been three years. I bend to look— a bud with pale gold threads —though I’ve never fed it. Why now? When nothing’s changed. Then I remember: It’s the anniversary of her death! & she reaches to touch me. [End Page 323] Toi Derricotte Toi Derricotte is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and author of five books of poems, including The Undertaker’s Daughter, Tender, and Captivity. She is also co-editor (with Cornelius Eady) of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, and author of a literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, winner of the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction. Derricotte is currently a member of the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. Copyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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