A Butterfly and its Shadow - Haiku

I took this photo earlier today – it's a Peacock butterfly – and I like the strong contrast between its colour and texture and the grey flatness of its shadow. Plus there is more contrast between the softness of the butterfly and the hard grittyness of the concrete path it's landed on. And there's more! What about the contrasts between the fleeting shadow, the more solid, live butterfly and the rock-hard, immovable concrete path?

Maybe you like other things in the photo? Or maybe you don't like it! Either way is fine. Make some notes, writing down words and phrases and then use them to write a haiku.

A haiku is a type of Japanese poem with just three lines. The first line has five syllables, the second has seven and the third has five syllables.

Here are my notes and the beginnings of my haiku:

You can see I made a few changes!

Peacock Haiku

Purple butterfly

lands soft on gritty concrete 

fleeting grey shadow

A syllable is a single unit of speech, so words are made up of one or more syllables. The name 'Jack' has one syllable, 'Eva has two (E-va) and 'Lucinda' (Lu-cin-da) has three.

If you don't want to write a haiku you can write your own sort of poem!