A versified excerpt from a conversation (I use the term loosely, as it was a bit hard to get a word in at the time). The title is not a misprint. No prize but much admiration for the first to decipher it:
Rhyme #9: Memento Moro
‘The kids today have no idea.
You must know, you’re about my age.
They think it was all Germaine Greer,
fat Elvis, punk, glam rock – no beige.
The seventies, in these confected
histories were cool, protected
from the darkness of our times:
all showbiz, glitz and fashion crimes.
I tell them of Brigate Rosse,
Baader-Meinhoff, Patty Hearst,
the Shining Path: there was a thirst
for violence then. It wasn’t glossy.
Look, where the light of memory dims,
at Lord Mountbatten’s scattered limbs.’
Aldo Moro.
Well done, that cat! Collective memory lives on.
I recall landing in late 1972 (en route to Europe) at Lod Airport in Israel – some six months after the Japanese Red Army attack on that place – bullet holes still in the plate glass window/walls looking out from the area where the attack took place.And then in mid-latter 1977 living in Munich during the time of the kidnap-murder of Industrialist Hanns-Martin SCHLEYER by the Rote Armee Faktion (RAF).
My interlocutor clearly had a point, Jim. He had similar stories of brushes with terrorism
Pol Pot!
He should have got a guernsey, Ween, but the pun in the title referred to Aldo Moro, kidnapped and killed by the Brigate Rosse