Over the past year Maria and I have been involved in a poetry group in Cardiff – a delightful assortment of creatives facilitated with gentle generosity by warm and soulful poet Bert (aka Roberto Pastore, whose work you must read). Bert’s knowledge of and love for poetry is profound but he shares it with the kind of light touch that makes you want to lean in, listen and experiment.

We meet under the awning of a tiny cafe, beyond us a little lake with ducks and overhanging trees, and a joyful-boy statue springing from a floral pond. Coffee-man Dan keeps the place open late (and if we’re lucky, reads us a poem of his own). Once the season shifts and the light shrinks, we move to a snug space inside an Indie market.

They are evening meetings which, for sisters with chronic fatigue, is a challenge. It means bedrest before, recovery after, and not being mid flare-up. Sometimes one of us makes it, sometimes the other, sometimes both or neither, but we are holding dear to it.

Now the group has published a Zine, a thing of beauty that quickly sold out, extra pleasing as all proceeds went to The Gaza Emergency Appeal. Maria’s gorgeous poem ‘Run’ is in there. She couldn’t be at The Launch cos of her health and an accident. But I was there and tho I didn’t submit for this edition, I did read my piece ‘Dear Elizabeth’. As long as one of us is there in person or on the page, then The Sequinned Sea Sisters, however fitfully, live on.