‘Stumble down life’s checkered street’

     
Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets, offers this today:


Brotherhood

Come, brothers all!
Shall we not wend
The blind-way of our prison-world
By sympathy entwined?
Shall we not make
The bleak way for each other’s sake
Less rugged and unkind?
O let each throbbing heart repeat
The faint note of another’s beat
To lift a chanson for the feet
That stumble down life’s checkered street.

- Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Douglas Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1880. A member of the Harlem Renaissance, her collections of poetry include The Heart of a Woman (The Cornhill Company, 1918) and Share My World (Halfway House, 1962). She died in 1966.