Nothing Lasts

As I walked out of my last class of college

it was a poetry class

my professor looked to us and said

In a number of years

the sun will swallow the earth

its burning arms grasping further and redder

until the planet boils off into the sky

and all the atoms that made up our bodies

drift away into gaseous clouds

in our tiny corner of the galaxy.

He said,

“Nothing lasts.”