The ancients say it was hammered thin,
a sheet of sky beaten out on an anvil of light,
arched over the world to keep the waters back.
But I think of it now as something softer,
something between what we know
and what we fear to name.
Some nights it feels solid as judgement,
a vault that will not cede,
the weight of all we have not changed
pressing down like unfallen rain.
Other nights it thins to chiffon,
a veil you could lift with two fingers
if only you dared look at what waits above.
Birds test it with their wings.
Stars press their cold signatures against it.
We walk beneath, pretending it is empty,
pretending the dome is only metaphor
and not the echo of our own desire
to be sheltered from the deep.
But sometimes,
in the hour before dawn,
or the moment after a truth is spoken,
you can feel it flex,
as if the world itself inhales,
as if the firmament remembers
it was once water, once chaos, once possibility,
and might be again.
And in that brief yielding
we stand exposed,
small, mortal, luminous,
held not by a dome of hammered sky
but by the thin mercy
of being willing to look up.