The Sun Won

Sol devours Earth in slow, scalding majesty; humanity flickers, laughs, and dies.

Sol, a red giant now,

swollen tyrant filling half the sky.

Its furnace breath is licking the continents like crumbs.

Earth's oceans rose in scalding applause,

then bowed out as steam.

Continents floated, cracked, and became drifting anvils—

glowing cherry-red at their edges.

No more east or west—

the horizon curled up as a burning scroll.

Mountains slumped like old candles,

their granite cores weeping as magma tears.

Time melted; clocks dripped from tower faces,

pooling into molten numerals that spelled 7:77.

Trapped on basalt rafts, our shadows evaporated long ago.

Our skin, parchment-thin, illuminated from within;

Now, human lanterns.

Language boiled down to one word: bright.

We whispered it to the windless heat;

A lullaby, a prayer, or a curse.

Behind us, cities hung in mid-collapse;

Glass domes sagging like soft wax.

Satellites streaked home as shooting stars that never cooled.

The moon, once timid,

now orbits as a red cinder inside the photosphere,

a captured ember in the dragon's throat.

And still the sun expanded, a monarch grown bored of its throne,

stretching its fire across the ecliptic,

until Mercury and Venus were swallowed—

without ceremony—just a gulp and glow.

Earth queued next, polite, resigned,

awaiting the final kiss from the chromospheric flame.

We held no illusions of escape.

No ark, no data ark, no cryogenic grin,

only the slow, certain evanescence into the solar plasma.

Yet, in that last glare, we saw the cosmic joke:

all our empires, our flags, and our sins,

everything compressed to a spark—would flicker in the sun's belly

for another one billion years.

After that, the white-hat dwarf will reign.

Sol's fusion now bows to the cold expanse.

—Noisy Wren, July 2025


40 Lines — for the Shadows and Light Poetry Contest.