This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox.
As we approach the end of 2025, it’s time to count our blessings, or—if not that—list the ways we might improve our lives or the lives of others. In her poem, “Life on the Farm: Things to Count On,” JoAnne Growney details the hard work of farm life—and profiles a strong mother on whom everyone could rely.
JoAnne Growney grew up on a farm in Western Pennsylvania and worked it with her father. Her family valued education, and an array of good teachers encouraged her interests in both mathematics and poetry. A college science scholarship led her to a math-teaching career, but her love of poetry continued and, when her children grew, she found time for both—captured in a long running blog entitled, “Intersections – Poetry with Mathematics” (at https://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com).
Most of us have heard the cliché, “Love is a verb.” JoAnne Growney’s poem “Life on the Farm: Things to Count On” models such practical giving of self. A tribute to the poet’s mother, the poem portrays the crowded, busy life of those running a family farm: “In seven days no minutes to be happy, no hours to be sad.” Set at Meadow Lane Farm in Indiana County, “Life on the Farm” is a quiet poem of acknowledgment and familial love.
Here’s “Life on the Farm: Things to Count On” by JoAnne Growney:
Life on the Farm: Things to Count On
-Meadow Lane Farm, Indiana County
I want to say how beautiful it was — but it was not. Each animal, each shed, each acre was useful; we kept them with good care and counted them, counted on them. One hundred forty acres, seven sheds. A white frame house, eight tall rooms and bath, a cellar with a dozen shelves for canned goods and four lines for laundry, a truck room for junk. We five in three bedrooms, four beds. One extra room for guests — my aunts. Our dining room with seven doors plus closets. A shed beside the corn crib with space for three wagons and a Plymouth. The barn with two mows for hay, a third for straw, a granary, a bathtub for livestock drinking, and six private stalls. Nine cows with two for milking, which I did. In seven days no minutes to be happy, no hours to be sad — not even when my father died. My mother's a good woman, worth three good women. For sixty years everyone has thought so, and more than a hundred have said, I've stopped counting.
This poem appears in my collection Red Has No Reason, published in 2010 by Plainview Press (Austin, TX) and was reprinted in Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025)
That was “Life on the Farm: Things to Count On” by JoAnne Growney. Thanks for listening.
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
