Frieda Hughes: My Week Was Pink

In between Greek and Hawaiian infernos and evacuating, not forgetting dogs, cats and rabbits,

And Ukraine and Russia baiting the burning bears in each other’s back yards,

The sweet pink stink of Barbie seeped through gaps, cracks and fissures in the landscape

As if the bark of trees, the crust of the earth and the bricks of buildings had become

Suddenly porous, skewered with holes punched by tiny plastic doll-fingers wanting freedom.

Sticky pink content glistened in the spotlight of entertainment news and film reviews;

The cinema queue outside my third-floor gym beckoned me to come in, come in, come in

And sit doing nothing for long enough to see this Barbie new reality.

So, now I’ve been, and find my mind unable to work through the images on screen,

So clogged by baby talk, so crushed by pink, so confused by the CEO of Mattel

Having an IQ much too low to limbo dance beneath, and Barbie announcing

She has no vagina to a team of builders ogling her perfect Margot Robbie legs and breasts.

When Ken creates Kendom I am relieved; he appears to have grown testicles, but then I see

The fawning women, second class and jobless again, until the Barbies snatch back Barbieland,

Leaving the Kens as a disenfranchised legacy. I wonder, what happened to equality?

I step into daylight past giggling pink girls, frowny boys and some pink mothers,

Shaking a cloying pink ash from my hair, my chest, my shoulders,

And climb back into black; black leathers on a black motorbike that would eat a blackbird

If it was feathered like its namesake. Back into a world of genitals and engines,

Dirt and partiality. Of all the Barbies ever made there was no motorbiking Barbie for me.