Bird on Bough

"The earth is just too big, too beautiful:
I like it small, through a window, catching
the light at day's end. I prefer poems
haiku-size; a pair of binoculars
through which I see one bluebird at a time,
the pink bib at its throat, the lacquered claws
curled upon an apple bough with the fruit
just setting on, a green miniscule globe
in whose meat I can taste Adam and Eve,
the whole sad history of our human grief."
First Stanza of Julia Alvarez's poem Small Portions from The Woman I Kept to Myself