I sing of man and of the words he stole

I sing of man and of the words he stole
From prior orators and philosophes
Through forgery or just through plagiarism
That strain the ethic of a modernism.

I sing of when I used to think that we
Were somehow meant to be original,
To stoke the fires of an avant-garde
By building new, divergent artifacts.

I sing of man! The words he taught himself
Were not the inventions of his caprice
But gifts of sound beyond his sovereignty.

I hear a simple phrase a dozen times;
So you who hear within these scattered rhymes
The song of others—criticize me not!