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#IWD2025 | #AccelerateAction
Celebrating International Women’s Day 2025
With a crossbreed acrostic tanka
With wombs we birth life
Our ova future proof us
Maternal instinct
Empowered female psyche
Ne’er underestimate us
© Carolyn Hastings 2025
Dedicated to the worlds’ women and girls on International Women’s Day, March 8 2025.
This year’s theme for International Women’s Day is Accelerate Action to emphasise ‘the importance of taking swift and decisive steps to achieve gender equality. It calls for increased momentum and urgency in addressing the systemic barriers and biases that women face, both in personal and professional spheres.’
Having come from a strong line of women, I was raised in the belief that it is the right of women the world over to have control of their own lives and their own bodies. I live in hope that one day we will achieve that status.
I have chosen to mark this year’s celebration of women by making a statement with a crossbreed of poetic forms — an acrostic tanka — not because there is anything inherently special about it, but simply because I have the capacity to do it.