Dear Vaccine

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Save us, dear vaccine.
Take us seriously.
We had plans.
We were going places.
Children in kindergarten.
So many voices, in chorus.
Give us our world again!
Tiny gleaming vials,
enter our cities and towns
shining your light.
Restore us to each other.

We liked our lives.
Maybe we didn’t thank them enough.
Being able to cross streets
with people we didn’t know,
pressing elevator buttons,
smiling at strangers,
standing in line to pay.
We liked standing in line
more than we pretended.

It’s a quick prick in the arm
you’ll barely notice it
It’s the gas in the car
getting us going again
It’s the turn in the road
Face-to-face conversation
someday soon?
It’s the hug. Forever,
it’s the hug!

Vaccine, please make the air clean!
We went to yoga classes,
deep collective breathing,
in small rooms in cities
where we didn’t even
live! How brave we were.
Vaccine, please.
Restore our lives.
Believe they were beautiful.

Reprinted with permission.

Read other poems by Naomi Shihab Nye in Everything Comes Next: Collected & New Poems, available online from Amazon.

Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye wrote “Dear Vaccine” as the seed poem for the Global Vaccine Poem Project, which invites people from all over the world to write their own letters to the COVID-19 vaccines, sharing any part of their own personal experience to form a “community poem” that now boasts nearly 2,100 poems from 118 countries and every state in the U.S. Though Nye’s poem begins with a plea to “save us,” she also invites us to reflect on the days before the pandemic, when we lived so blithely unaware of what might be taken away: “How brave we were,” she writes. By personalizing her wish for an eventual return to the togetherness and ease we once took for granted, Nye echoes the feelings of people around the globe, baring their arms for needles in the hopes of reclaiming some of what’s been lost—“being able to cross streets/with people we didn’t know,/pressing elevator buttons,/smiling at strangers.” “Dear Vaccine” showcases Nye’s trademark exuberance and her infectious voice. Yet like so many of the pieces posted on the project’s site, it’s also filled with yearning for a medicine that may not “restore our lives” exactly as they were, but might help us value the hugs, yoga classes, and all that time we used to spend “standing in line to pay,” with no idea we’d someday miss the most ordinary of our moments the most.

Invitation for Writing & Reflection: Write your own “Dear Vaccine” poem, sharing all of your own hopes for a future beyond the pandemic, as well as the seemingly ordinary things you miss about “normal life,” all the ways you too were brave back then without realizing it. Consider adding your own piece to the project by visiting: www.globalvaccinepoem.com

ABOUT THE POET: Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States (Poetry Foundation). She has written or edited more than 30 books, including 9 anthologies of poems, and has been poetry editor for the Texas Observer and the New York Times Magazine. She is on faculty at Texas State University and has been a visiting writer all over the world, all her adult life. Her most recent books are Everything Comes Next: Collected & New Poems, Cast Away (Poems about Trash), The Tiny Journalist, and Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

POETRY SELECTION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES CREWS

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. James teaches at SUNY-Albany and lives with his husband in Vermont.

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