The Forty Files

Happy International Women’s Day.

I’ve been playing around with some poetry this month and wanted to share a piece here. To all the beautiful, strong women in my life — may you continue to shine, to lead, and to remind the world of the power you carry. Today and always, rise up.

Oh, to be a woman— to carry galaxies in the quiet curve of a womb, to knit bone and breath from blood and time, to feel the first thunder of a heartbeat that was once only a whisper.

To be a woman— to run, to leap, to lift the impossible, to shatter records and ceilings and silence, yet watch the numbers beside our names shrink when the paychecks come.

To be a woman— to build the world twice over: once with our hands, once with our bodies, and still be told our labor is lighter.

To know our daughters are watching, eyes bright with the same fierce dreams as the boys beside them— and to feel the quiet ache of knowing the scales are not balanced.

To know we can vote, that our voices echo in halls of power, yet when the laws return to our doorsteps they speak over the language of our own bodies.

Oh, to be a woman— to carry strength like a secret fire, to stand in storms that question our worth, to keep loving a world that keeps asking us to prove it.

And still we rise, hands open, voices steady, teaching our daughters that worth is not measured by the weight others give it— but by the life we dare to create within it.