A school English paper gave one Irish family a very odd case of déjà vu.
Emily Cullen learned that a poem she wrote about her son seven years ago had turned up in his high school test paper, the BBC and The Irish Times reported.
Cullen said her 15-year-old son Lee came home with good news, and at first she thought it was about Shakespeare.
“He had a big, broad smile on his face and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s good. He must have remembered some Shakespeare quotes,’ ” Cullen, a poet in residence at the University of Limerick, told the BBC.
Instead, she said, “[He said] you won’t believe it, mum, the poem you wrote about me came up in the paper.”
Lee is a student at Coláiste Éinde secondary school in Galway, Ireland.
The poem, Envoi in Chalk, was written by Cullen in 2019 and was first published as a “poem of the week” in The Irish Times in December that year, according to the outlet.
Cullen wrote it during a difficult period when her mother was in hospital. She told the BBC she was moved to write it after seeing Lee, then 8, write on the pavement in chalk: “The world is great.”
“That message just elevated my whole day,” Cullen said. “It was just what I needed to remind me that there was beauty all around me and lots of wonder in the everyday. And the poem just came out. It literally wrote itself.”
She said she never expected the poem to return to her son in an exam paper years later.
“[I thought] Is this really happening? My own 15-year-old son answering a question on a poem that I’ve written?” she said. “I got quite emotional about it … I was just kind of in a state of pleasant shock. It was a once-in-a-lifetime synchronicity.”
Cullen told the BBC that Lee made the “wise decision” to answer the exam questions in the third person because he thought examiners would not believe he was the subject of the poem.
Coláiste Éinde deputy principal Seamus Kelly told The Irish Times the appearance of the poem in Lee’s test was a “lovely coincidence.”
“The message Lee chalked on the pavement and the message of the poem is so positive and life-affirming, a young boy’s view of the world that gives us all a lift,” he said.
Cullen said the poem, which appears in her third poetry collection Conditional Perfect, feels even more poignant after the death of her mother.
“I think things come in cycles,” she said. “We do have to kind of remind ourselves of the gifts that life is and the wonders all around us in abundance amid the darkness and the dark times.”
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