There are people with cactus hides
that walk across the desert sand
where others would
if not for fear that they would die.
Perhaps, it was evolution
that made their skin so thick;
perhaps, it was room to blossom
that first attracted them
away from fertile field and plain
into the fringes
of an arid desert so sparse
that life itself seemed to have hid
until at last an ecosystem bloomed
where a forest could never bud.
