Seventeen words, two couplets, not a single full stop: Dave Bonta's "Cheer" is small enough to learn by heart in the time it takes to read it twice. Yet it holds a whole small drama of listening. A walker, on the way home, hears hawks calling from far off, recognises the sound, and is quietly gladdened by it. The poem never says "I felt glad". The word "cheer" does that work for it.
That word is the poem's most interesting choice. A hawk's call is usually described as a scream or a shriek, something sharp and predatory. Bonta calls it a cheer, and the effect is to flip our expectations. Across a great distance, the cry becomes something like the noise of a crowd at a match, or a greeting called out to a passer-by. "Cheer" also carries its older sense of good spirits, as in "good cheer", so the word describes the hawks' sound and the listener's mood at once. The title is then repeated as the first line, "the cheer of hawks", as though the speaker is still turning the word over, pleased with it. Whether the hawks are cheerful or the walker simply hears them that way is left open, and that ambiguity is part of the poem's charm. The sound is real, but the feeling has been added by the person listening.
Distance matters just as much. "A great way off" is a slightly old-fashioned, down-to-earth phrase, the kind you might hear from someone giving directions on a country road. It makes the hawks remote and unreachable, and it also makes the cheer faint, something you catch rather than something that hits you. The first couplet is only a noun phrase and an adverbial phrase, with no verb at all. Nothing happens in it. It is pure perception, a sound hanging in the air before anyone has reacted to it.
The second couplet brings in the human. "That familiar sound" is the poem's turning point, because "familiar" changes the moment from noticing to recognising. The speaker has heard this before, perhaps many times, and the sound belongs to the place the way a neighbour's voice might. Only in the final line does "I" appear, and only there does a verb: "I walk home." The structure mirrors the way the speaker's attention moves, from the far-off sky to the body on the ground. The lines also lengthen as they go, from four syllables to four, then five, then seven, so the poem seems to travel towards the speaker and arrive with him at "home". Ending on that word gives the sound a quiet significance. The familiar cry of the hawks feels like part of coming home.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and it needs neither. It does have gentle sound-patterns. The long, open vowel of "hawks" is echoed in "walk", so the first couplet and the last line are linked across the gap, as if the bird's cry were being answered by the walker's footsteps. "Great" and "way" share a vowel, and "off" has a soft landing that lets the line fade out, which suits a sound dying away across a distance. The lack of capitals and punctuation adds to this. Nothing is fixed or closed off, and the poem seems to continue after its last word, the way a walk does.
What makes "Cheer" worth reading is how much it trusts a small moment. It doesn't explain the hawks, describe the landscape, or tell us why the sound matters. It resembles a haiku in spirit, though it doesn't follow that form's syllable count, because it gets its power from restraint and from the quiet shock of one well-chosen word. For a student, it shows that a poem can be built almost entirely out of attention: hearing something, naming it exactly, and letting the reader feel what the speaker feels. By the end, "cheer" seems less a description of the hawks than of what it is like to be welcomed by a world you know well.