You know the way you can hear a hawk's cry echo down to you as it flies overhead? It's almost as if it's working by sonar, measuring distances with its cry. That's how this poem sounds. The long lines unfurl, each new phrase adding new dimensions of meaning and music.
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons. (1-5)
In other places in the poem, the somber, measured tone starts and stops:
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him. (15-17)
The punctuation duplicates a kind of shuddering, a stop and start progression. Likewise there's a mix of high and low diction and of sharp consonants and smoother vowels in lines 1-2. Life isn't all sunshine and buttercups. There are battered hawks dying out there, people.