Salt Sky

Image from pixabay.com

Every summer during my childhood, our family would spend a weekend camping on the lake near our home in East Tennessee. Mom would fill boxes and coolers full of food and drink, while Papa went to the gas station to fill the tank of his fishing boat. Then all six of us would pile into the truck and head out over our town’s twisty, two-lane roads to the boat ramp by Grainger County Park.

Once on the lake, we'd munch on the homemade fried chicken, potato salad, and chocolate wet cake Mom had packed for lunch while we cruised around looking for the perfect stretch of shoreline to claim as our own. Once settled there, we’d spend the rest of the day swimming, fishing, and skiing. As the sun began to set, we kids would scurry up the bank into the trees to gather firewood and marshmallow sticks while Mom and Papa laid out the fixins for our feast of hot dogs, pork and beans, coleslaw, and s’mores.

Then we'd sit around the fire telling stories until we were nodding off with exhaustion. Crawling into our sleeping bags arranged side-by-side on the bank, it never occurred to us kids to worry that we didn't have a tent to cover us—that we were exposed to whatever weather or critters might come during the night. We were too overwhelmed with wonder at the night sky, which seemed to blanket us in its own protective embrace.

I remember lying there thinking about how vast it was, and how very small I was in comparison.

By morning, when we'd wake damp with dew and disheveled from our slow slide downhill toward the water, that night sky was gone from my conscious awareness—replaced by the tantalizing smell of eggs, bacon, and potatoes ‘n onions frying in the iron skillet. But it never really disappeared. It simply settled somewhere deeper, waiting for Alberto Ríos's "Salt Sky" to carry me back to that sleeping bag on the lakeshore beneath a sky so immense that it made the world seem both larger and kinder.

Salt Sky

by Alberto Ríos

The bright night sky,
Doorway to everything—

In all that black
All those stars:

Salt.
Pinpricks.

White fireworks.
Perlite.

We look up
Pulled into the immensity,

Lifted into the limitless—
As if it were a hole

We are falling into,
Up instead of down.

We stand on the earth,
Breathe in the night.

It is all too big.
We go back inside.

Published in Poetry magazine (January/February 2026) by the Poetry Foundation.