April sky, Cuneiform moon, Digital Moma Underground & The moon is still up

First of April brought storm here in Germany, but also this blue sunset moment with the moon standing in the sky, above a churning and glowing cloud.

The moon, it was up on thursday evening, too, while I read a different kind of trip report: "Six Trees and Two White Dogs ...  Doves?", from Tom Sleigh, a writer/poet who spent some time in Irag to talk with Iraqi writers, professors, and students at Iraqi universities about literature and creative writing workshops, and about the situation of contemporary Iraqi literature. His lines freely move between the now and the past, between recent history and writing.
Here ia a quote from the first paragraph:

"The plane leveled off at cruising altitude, and through the pitted glass I saw the Tigris winding through Baghdad, the city hazy in the morning light. ... Underneath us, I watched the shadow of the Dash ripple across the vast green plain between the Tigris and Euphrates. Mesopotamia means “the land between the rivers”...  I was astonished to actually be seeing what I had known since grade school as “the cradle of civilization.” I remember reading about cuneiform writing, and thinking that it looked like the marks that a flock of crows’ feet would leave in our muddy garden if it froze solid overnight..."

"Cuneiform writing", I had to look it up, then realized I know it, and have seen it museums: "Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known systems of writing, distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets ...Emerging in Sumer in the late 4th millennium B.C.E., cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs." (wiki/Cuneiform)

Now I just googled "Cuneiform, moon", and arrived at the MoMa Online Collection: "Cuneiform tablet: procedure text for the moon". It sounds curious - it doesn't give any further explanation, though. And makes me want to visit the MoMa...

I didn't know they have so many blogs, here's a link from the Moma Digital Underground that I just bookmarked, to return to: "Moma: Our Year in Blogging: A Few Highlights"

Back to Iraq - reading about the trip made me think of a series of poems from there, from the BluePrintReview archives. Now to find the link .. well, it turns out, the poem is not about Iraq but about Afghanistan. But starting with the moon, so it fits on a lunar level:

In Afghanistan: The Moon's Still Up
When we first set out – it seems like days now,
though surely it's only hours – the moon hung heavy in the sky,
an insistent luminescence in green
while, through night vision, we picked our way
precisely through the desert night.

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more sky moments from around the world: sky friday
more sky moments in this blog: life as a journey/sky diary