Yusef Lateef Gold digital graphic courtesy of Bright Skylark Literary Productions .                             (based on original 1968 Atlantic Records album for "The Blue Yusef Lateef) “ When the soul looks out of its body, it should see only beauty in its path. These are the sights we must hold in mind, in order to move to a higher place.” Yusef Lateef, from “A Syllogism”   How could I have known, as a nine-year-old child growing up in Savannah’s Hitch Village project, that Yusef Lateef was speaking light in the form of music directly to my soul through his saxophone and flute when I first heard his masterpiece of an album The Blue Yusef Lateef ? I could not have imagined that years later, while seeking the timbres of my own creative voice out in the world, his would find me again. It happened this time as I sat in the window of a hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, the haunting blues-heavy moans of “Juba Juba” swelling the room as t

Celebrated poet and theater directory Clinton D. Powell . For a tribute in poetry and prose to one of the celebrated poets in the history of Savannah, Georgia, please click this link : A poem for a poet

(Michael Jackson on stage circa 1995. Photographer unknown.) You probably can’t read the words on the note next to the accompanying photo of Michael Jackson, but they were handwritten by the singer himself during the mid 1990s when he was constantly on tour and just as constantly a subject of much public ridicule and condemnation. This note was composed on hotel stationery and, complete with original spellings, grammar, and format, reads as follows : “like the old Indian proverb says do not judge a man until you’ve walked 2 moons in his moccasins. Most people don’t know me, that is why they write such things in wich most is not true I cry very very often because it hurts and I worry about the children all my children all over the world, I live for them. If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written. Animals strike, not from malice, but because they want to live, it is the same with those who criticize, they desire our blood, not our