Live Free or Die Enjambing

Jilly Dybka of Poetry Hut Blog performs her job with true diligence. Every day she has links to interesting news on poetry that you won't find on Poetry Daily. Her blog is a daily read for me. Today she has a link to an interview with Cynthia Huffington, the new poet laureate of New Hampshire.

I have lived in that state in the past. Its borders are within 3 miles of my home now. And I hike its shoreline and mountains on a regular basis. I guess I'm saying that I feel a close connection to the state, and therefore its laureate.

So I went to read the interview and saw that Donald Hall was her teacher. Being that Mr. Hall is one of my favorite contemporary poets, I went looking for some of her poems on-line. Here are some links:

The Strange Insect from POetry Daily
Untitled from Poetry Daily
Curse One: The Wraith from poets.org
The Rapture from Four Way Books
Accidental from Ploughshares
From Exile from Ploughshares
The Length of The Hour from Ploughshares
Calm from Ploughshares

Ok. That's a long list culled from a few minutes of Googling. I haven't read them all yet. But this first one, The Strange Insect, I have, and for the life of me can't get past the lines that end with "a":

It is black and long, like a widow, or a
sacred priest, has a yellow necklace and

and

thin like a straw, like a wasp, thin as a
quill, is hanging on a piece of what was

I just don't understand the reasoning behind it nor hear any rhythmic cause for it. Is it the strange insect of form itself? It's certainly strange. More free verse magic I guess.