May Your Days Go by in Beauty & Wonder
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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 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.
