The Closet Professor

Come Let Us Be Friends
By Sarah Lee Brown Fleming

Come, let us be friends, you and I,
    E’en though the world doth hate at this hour;
Let’s bask in the sunlight of a love so high
    That war cannot dim it with all its armed power.

Come, let us be friends, you and I,
    The world hath her surplus of hatred today;
She needeth more love, see, she droops with a sigh,
    Where her axis doth slant in the sky far away.

Come, let us be friends, you and I,
    And love each other so deep and so well,
That the world may grow steady and forward fly,
    Lest she wander towards chaos and drop into hell.

About This Poem

“Come Let Us Be Friends” appears in Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s poetry collection Clouds and Sunshine (The Cornhill Company, 1920). In Afro-American Women Writers, 1746–1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide (G.K. Hall, 1988), American journalist and associate librarian, Ann Allen Shockley, remarks that Fleming “has been unnoticed as an early novelist and poet of the twentieth century. Her books were not mentioned in Jet’s brief historical capsule about her. She is remembered more for her social and civic contributions than for her writing. […] [A]nd despite the energy she poured into community work, she managed to write songs, plays, musicals, skits, short stories, and essays. She felt that her writing would be better, however, if she were able to improve her mind. Thus, she tried to strengthen her educational background by taking correspondence courses, particularly in creative writing.” In the anthology Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2006), author and editor Maureen Honey notes that “although [Fleming’s] poetry never made it into journals of the Harlem Renaissance, she exemplifies many of the movement’s tenets in her determination to combine political, intellectual, and creative work as a way to move the race forward.”

About the Poet

Sarah Lee Brown Fleming, born on January 10, 1875, in Charleston, South Carolina, was an activist and a writer. She also became the first African American teacher in Brooklyn’s educational system. Fleming authored a novel, Hope’s Highway (The Neale Publishing Company, 1918), and a poetry collection, Clouds and Sunshine (The Cornhill Company, 1920). She died on January 5, 1963.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 17, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.