Founded 1855 in Iowa by a group calling themselves Inspirationists originated in Germany about 1714. The immigrants ‘according to His laws and His requirements in our own consciences’ attempted a community sharing work and wealth equally that persisted up to the Depression but that exists now as tourist bait close to Interstate 80: ‘one of the midwest’s most historic and recent attractions.’
Fortitude, endurance, amana: remain faithful.
We survive the sea and the great silences.
Under God and the blue sky we share all we have.
Amana – we put a spade to the wilderness.
Amana – skill of our hands on the new turned land.
Amana – the word is our breath, we share,
we survive the woods that are gone
where the redmen went hearing the rain speak.
Amana, the corn roots, cattle and vines,
mortise and tenon, coins and sweat run together.
Amana, our work and our bread.
Amana. The voice within each of us speaks.
In the turning of wood or habit of speech
that old life may whisper, a black dress
fluttered in wind, wooden shoes in the snow,
poverty chewing its nails, winter and summer.
Will nothing of sharing survive, the cry
of what was weathered away in the guidebook.
Erosion is paint from an aerosol can, visitors
sniffing repeating authentic authentic –
a word in the mouth. We make and we sell,
we share our dead root, we dream of endurances
What prints mark butterchurn, spinning-wheel,
what is a scythe’s use, how held, what sweats
stain the handles of tools? What sleeps
in the dropped vowels or survives
in the ticking of clocks? Why these names
and amana, this word that remains, that endures?