The History You Know
By Andrew R. Duckworth There are gravel roads, may they never be paved, that hold history. They’re a mess and they shift, get washed out by floods. Somewhere down the road are my footprints out in the middle of nowhere—the history you know but at which few others care to look, the history everyone makes…
Cultivating
By Andrew R. Duckworth We’re always told to get on board with the new ways or we’ll be left behind. By what? Unsure. Probably left behind by those who think they own the world, the ones who buy up large swaths of land just to desecrate it. They can pass me by. I’ll be out…
Forgotten Things
By Andrew R. Duckworth In the yellow fields close to Santa Fe, New Mexico, there are dark shrubs that, from a distance, remind one of the buffalo that once made it their home, as if those yellow fields aren’t lonely enough. People were there once too. The further west one travels, the bigger the graveyards…
Accompanied
By Andrew R. Duckworth When I see the vast loneliness of the yellow fields against the mesas and mountains, I don’t feel alone. I’m accompanied by a hundred fresh thoughts of wonder and awe. I wonder what the first person to lay eyes on this land felt.
Erased
By Andrew R. Duckworth The cliff sides hold a billion stories of creation and destruction, of life once present—vanished, dead and gone but remaining—now the history book. Just like we rewrite history, along comes the backhoe to erase it.
No More Hooves
By Andrew R. Duckworth In Palo Duro Canyon, there are distant sounds you can still hear, ancient echoes of a time that has passed into the land—the sounds of thousands of hooves stamping the ground and making their marks, but, one by one, fading away, their blood crying out from the blood-colored sand.
I’ll Never
By Andrew R. Duckworth I’ll never tell someone not to trip on the shifting rock, the one that speaks wisdom to the soul and catches one off-guard, too confident in one’s own steps. My father never failed me that way. I’ll never tell someone not to trip on the shifting rock.
Bulldozing Monuments
By Andrew R. Duckworth New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, monuments to God’s handiwork. But man built the bulldozer, thinking in his wicked heart that he knows better. So we now seek to build the data center. No one stopped long enough to cherish the views, the history, the countless footsteps, the paths of the…
The Dry Riverbed
By Andrew R. Duckworth Off the road driving away from Tucumcari is a shallow river with a fork. One side-too shallow for fish, the other-dry as a bone. How long until it all becomes that way, until the water no longer flows in this place? This dry place holds too many stories to count, stories…
What I Say
By Andrew R. Duckworth Some understand more than the words convey when I say that on down the western trail is an unforgiving spirit of forgiveness that stabs at one with daggers while giving them the will to find the strength within their feet. And, once one makes it down that path, there’s no more…
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Poetry and Essays of Andrew Ryan Duckworth 