Together
O, come, Love, let us take a walk,
Down the Way-of-Life together;
Storms may come, but what care we,
If be fair or foul the weather.
When the sky overhead is blue,
Balmy, scented winds will after
Us, adown the valley blow
Haunting echoes of our laughter.
When Life’s storms upon us beat
Crushing us with fury, after
All is done, there’ll ringing come
Mocking echoes of our laughter.
So we’ll walk the Way-of-Life,
You and I, Love, both together,
Storm or sunshine, happy we
If be foul or fair the weather.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 15, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Together” originally appeared in The Widening Light (Walter Reid, 1922).
Carrie Williams Clifford
Carrie Williams Clifford was born in September 1862 in Chillicothe, Ohio. A poet and activist, she is the author of The Widening Light (Walter Reid, 1922) and Race Rhymes (R. L. Pendleton, 1911).
A cofounder and the first president of the Ohio State Federation of Colored Women, Clifford hired Black women for the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the NAACP. She taught in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and worked as an editor for the Cleveland Journal. She died in 1934.