The first poem is by Fernando Pessoa.
The second poem, by Tony Hoagland, was inspired by Pessoa.
The Innumerable by Fernando Pessoa (translated by A. S. Kline)
The innumerable live in us;
when I think or feel, I do not know
who it is thinks or feels.
I am merely a place
of feeling or thought.
I have more souls than one.
There are more I’s than myself.
I exist nonetheless
indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.
The conflicting impulses
of what I feel or do not feel
dispute inside who I am.
I ignore them. They dictate nothing
to the one I know. I write.
The Question by Tony Hoagland
“We are what is missing from the world”
~ Fernando Pessoa
Some questions have no answer.
Raised, they hang there in the mind
Like open mouths, full of something missing.
The great Portuguese poet, Pessoa,
Said that the idea of happiness
Is what makes men permanently sad.
The body, imagining the soul,
Looks ugly to itself.
A man hears a word, and the world
Becomes a place that he misunderstands.
So he climbs high into his life,
Ashamed of all he doesn’t know,
And refuses to come down.
If you could coax him out again,
You could tell him, say,
That anything can be explained.
The shape of apples, for example,
By their love of travel.
Or that the sky is blue because
It’s an easy color on the eyes.
Even the dog, chasing its tail,
Has, temporarily, a center.
Even the bird, disappearing into his hole
Knows that the world goes on without it.
And Pessoa, that eminently healthy man,
That artist, wore a blue wool hat
Even on the hottest summer days.
Simply to toss at strangers in the street.
He liked to see them catch it,
And grow immediately less strange.
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was a prolific writer both in his own name and approximately seventy-five other names, of which three stand out: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. He did not define these as pseudonyms because he felt that this did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms, a term he invented. Learn more at Wikipedia.
I am nothing.
I’ll never be anything.
I couldn’t want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.
~ Fernando Pessoa
