The world was curious when man first appeared.
It had seen the beginnings of life and the time of the big dinosaurs.
But soon after man began to crawl, he made use of the world in a way she did not understand.
He burnt her wood and made fire.
The world was quiet and watched silently the small lights which appeared more and more in the darkness.
The world did not measure time in the same way man did.
She saw no need to.
And while man chalked off the number of suns that appeared,
The world quietly spun around the Sun, feeling its warmth on one part of her body and then on another.
So it was that while man saw his history in the days he could count,
The world saw hers in only blinks.
It was, thus, to the world that man was only a merge of blinks,
From the coming of man to when he began to cut deep into her soul.
Blind to his own needs, he strove to feed the machines and factories,
From the steam of the fire, he had learnt to harness.
The world could not speak to man.
He did not listen to the languages she could use.
She could only watch and feel silently, as he ripped from her the coal, iron and oil he sort.
In the passing of time, all this new activity of man baffled the world.
She wondered when he would stop and she could heal herself.
Man never did.
The world learnt from man.
She learnt the meaning of his time,
For she never forgot a quarter past eight on the sixth day of the eighth month in 1945.
Man called this Hiroshima.
This was the time when man showed how he could play with atoms.
The people of that moment, and of that very small place on the surface of the world, who did not die, screamed.
Nobody heard the world scream.
With all the naivety of a child, man built upon that which he had created.
He began to think himself clever, as he brought such big disasters under his control.
Yet, he was blind to the many small parts of the smaller disasters,
He was creating that were building up.
The world could not stop man.
All she could do was to watch and to wait.
Slowly her air became less clear.
Her plants began to choke more and more.
And through all her agonies, great seams began to open in her skin.
Man gave these names like earthquake, volcano and the cause of typhoon.
And while these names were not new to man,
Once more, he only saw how much bigger they were to those that had been before.
The smaller changes, man did not see.
Man did not see how his winters, did not snow as they used to do.
He did not see how his summers where hotter than they were before.
He did not watch the great ice walls of the Arctic and Antarctic slowly crack, fall away and dissolve in the great grey sea.
Some of man did see this,
But their voices were as unheard as those of the world,
And gradually and more gradually, the water level rose more and more.
By the time huge masses of land had been covered
And man had drifted to higher land,
The air was already too hot to sustain his life.
The sun once more blinked to the world and man was gone.
The world felt sad for man.
She felt sad, because he had never learnt to listen.
Roy Andersen