“To be great, be whole,” By Fernando Pessoa

To be great, be whole; exclude

Nothing, exaggerate nothing that is you.

Be whole in everything. Put all you are

Into the smallest thing you do.

The whole moon gleams in every pool,

It rides so high.

(1933)

From “Poems of Fernando Pessoa,” translated and edited by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (City Lights: 240 pp., $15.95)