Alison Prince’s islands can be at once a place longed-for from exile and “reassuring little skerries of relief” to raise the spirits.

The poet and distinguished children’s writer herself lives and works on the island of Arran. She has written biographies of Kenneth Grahame and Hans Christian Andersen, has won the Guardian Children’s Fiction and SAC Children’s Book of the Year Awards, and, twice, the Literary Review’s Grand Poetry Prize.

The thoughtful piece below is her contribution to I’m Coming With You, Scottish PEN’s anthology of prose and poetry celebrating its ninetieth anniversary (£8).

                        ISLANDS

Missing the sea, cast up like bladderwrack

beyond all tides to dry black in a sun

blocked off by square, high building tops, I am

aching with desperation to be back

on the island where each casual gaze

is outward to the linking, steady line

of the horizon. Yet struggling to find

ease shows that the eye has subtle ways

of reassurance. Buddleia has grown

fat purple blossoms halfway up a wall

and further on a dandelion unrolls

its gold in a crack between paving stones.

Here is a tree that the Council has put

in a littered gap. See how it tries

to prosper. Chopped by its leaves, the sky

is the same sky that will glow at sunset

over the far-off sea. This time will pass.

Meanwhile, these little skerries of relief

offer a hopscotch of non-urban life,

rock after rock. Privet, a patch of grass,

a gutter puddle left from last night’s rain.

Such things do not perceive human distress

or know themselves as lovely, effortless

islands of safety for a marooned brain.