"Social Security" [by Terence Winch]

Social Security

No one is safe. The streets are unsafe.
Even in the safety zones, it’s not safe.
Even safe sex is not safe.
Even things you lock in a safe
are not safe. Never deposit anything
in a safe-deposit box, because it
won’t be safe there. Nobody is safe
at home during baseball games anymore.

At night I go around in the dark
locking everything, returning
a few minutes later
to make sure I locked
everything. It’s not safe here.
It’s not safe and they know it.
People get hurt using safety pins.

It was not always this way.
Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of winged dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.

From The Paris Review no. 156 (Fall 2000)

 Richard Howard chose this poem for "The Paris Review."  Richard was the magazine's poetry editor for ten or eleven terrific years (1992-2003).  

Comments

[jim c]

what a terrific poem! thanks.

[Emily Fragos]

A terrific poem worthy of Richard Howard's selection. Thank you, Terence. It's Groundhog Day!

[Steffi Green]

wonderful!

[MARK PAWLAK]

Terrific poem, T!

[Thomas E Davis]

If there ever was a poet, Terence Winch makes the grade. Wonderful, dancing poem with a bite.

[Kyril Alexander Calsoyas]

Since "terrific" is the gist, a little background from Grammarphobia 2013:

"TERRIFIC" This adjective originally meant “causing terror, terrifying; terrible, frightful; stirring, awe-inspiring; sublime.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for “terrific” in this sense is from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which describes the Serpent in Paradise as a subtle beast “with brazen Eyes And hairie Main terrific.”

In less than a century, Oxford says, “terrific” took on a weakened sense: “Of great size or intensity; excessive; very severe.”

The earliest example of this new usage in the dictionary is from a 1743 translation of Horace’s lyric poetry: “How cou’d … Porphyrion of terrific size … stand against the Warrior-goddess?”

It took another century, according to the OED citations, for “terrific” to take on the modern sense of “an enthusiastic term of commendation: amazing, impressive; excellent, exceedingly good, splendid.”

The first example of this sense is from an advertisement in the Oct. 21, 1871, issue of The Athenaeum, a journal of science and the arts:

“The last lines of the first ballad are simply terrific,—something entirely different to what any English author would dream of, much less put on paper.”

So “terrific” evolved from “terrifying” to “excessive” to “amazing” in a little over two centuries.

Meanwhile, much the same thing happened with “terribly,” the adverbial form of “terrible.” A very negative 15th-century word meaning severely or painfully had evolved by the mid-19th century into a general adverb meaning “very” or “greatly” (as in “greatly amused”).

[David Lehman]

I completely agree with Steffi Green.