A Junior Cycle pupil in Co Galway opened his higher-level English paper this week and found something few students ever do: a poem written by his own mother. Lee Davison, 15, sat the exam at Coláiste Éinde in Salthill and later told Emily Cullen that Envoi in Chalk had appeared in section D of the paper.

The poem’s presence in this year’s State exams has made the round of conversation because it is both personal and public at once. Cullen, a poet in residence at the University of Limerick, wrote Envoi in Chalk in 2019 and it was chosen as Poem of the Week in The Irish Times that December, long before it turned up in an exam hall in Galway.

For Davison, the moment after the paper was the one that mattered. He told his mother on Wednesday that the poem she had written about him had come up, and he answered the question in the third person because he thought the person marking his paper might not believe him if he revealed where the poem came from. Cullen said she was “very happy” to hear it, and called it “an incredible feeling”.

The poem itself began with a chalk message outside the family’s Rahoon home. Cullen said her son had written the words “The world is great” on the pavement, and she has said the poem wrote itself after she saw it. She wrote it in 2019, when her own mother was still alive but in hospital, and later included it in her third poetry collection, Conditional Perfect, published by Doire Press.

There is one detail that keeps the story from becoming a neat family anecdote. Davison did not tell the examiner what he knew, because he did not think the marker would believe him. That means the public headline is clear, but the private exam result is not: nobody has said how he scored on the question that featured his mother’s work.

Seamus Kelly, deputy principal at Coláiste Éinde, called it “a lovely coincidence” and said the message Lee chalked on the pavement and the message of the poem were “so positive and life-affirming, a young boy’s view of the world that gives us all a lift”. For Cullen, the overlap between home and exam hall was exactly that: a rare, bright interruption to a school paper, and one that left her son with the last word in the classroom, even if he gave it in the third person.