Apple

 

grew to the exact weight and balance to fall

   turned on its axis in the wind sufficient to fall

   here where it rests in a thankyou bowl like a still life

 

cool as to touch and that way for weeks of time

   colours over every curve soft to disappear

   an invitation to bite and bright till they’re gone

 

once bitten twice why not the scent of airy wood

   is it or watery flesh or bitter or sweet it is

   to the last mouthful the scent of our world

 

the crunch the head inside hears the chop chomp

   intimations of mortality inimitable

   serendipitous bitesize gulps  

 

tasting belonging to be and the longing to be

   going on forever a taste of this airy world

   fresh acidic sunny tart champagne

 

 

 

Grapes

called red but regularly polished black or dried blood

   they bubble a languorous still life

   freak storms could have drowned to oblivion last summer

 

yet tousled searching for the best ones they lob and huddle

   bobbled they are plastic fluid to the fingertips

   gripping to stems and tugged loose with a bend

 

dewy mornings suffuse their surfaces

   the faintest hint of young wine comes and goes

   that could have been their surfeit in a vat

 

instead of such fate they burst readily in the mouth

   turning their fair share of moisture to the good

   and sweetness textbook adjectives strive to match

 

their skins mingle in the multitudinous juice

   drawing up sediment oddments and pips lips spit out

    into the fond recycle of air and earth 

 

 

Microcredentials

 April 30 Word of the Day: Microcredentials

 

Remembering to turn the calendar at the end of the month is a subject no one learnt at school. A pinch and a punch for the first of the month was, at some stage, included in the one-hour microcredential course on offer, free of charge, on the domestic front.

 Later in life, that is to say the following month, it was unfortunate if you caught a cold and missed the class on hyphens, those compounding chemists of grammar busy forcing different elements into new formations. Life is dotted, even dashed sometimes, with the perennial challenge of when a word goes from being a micro-credential, finding its feet so to speak in a joint venture, to microcredential, the fully fledged latest addition to the vocabulary, or if you prefer fully-fledged. There is a lifetime of catch-up (see also, catch up) if you missed the class and find no one (see also, no-one) offers diplomas in hyphens nowadays.

 Accelerated learning is a lifelong practice, if you are alert and open to new experiences. In a single day you may earn degrees for such microcredentials as improved access to tinned goods, opening the jar screwed shut by a robot, or prising the thin plastic supermarket bag at the tear for your selection of peaches – all with no tears!

 Module seems to be the larger or governing term for every kind of microcredential, modules coming into vogue around the time of the first moon landing. An astronaut with microcredentials in moonwalking takes a small step in the belief this is an augury for a giant leap. Though his dependence on modules is too obvious to mention, certainly the astronaut can add small steps to his CV. Golfing on the moon is next level, where just teeing off deserves a microcredential of its own, let alone bunkering out of a crater.

 Some people complain that microcredentials has too many syllables, why not just extras, or skills, or add ons, or add-ons? Resistance to the idea of a Diploma in Details or Certificate in Specifics is observable, while others are too busy organising microcredential reading lists and one-hour interfaces to be concerned with semantics, let alone if microcredentials is a product of our time, or in fact something people do every day without any personal recognition whatsoever, and have done since BC.