When Emily Cullen picked up her son after his English exam, she assumed the smile on his face meant things had gone well.

Instead, the Galway poet was about to discover that a poem she had written seven years earlier, and which was inspired by him, had appeared on the paper.

“He had a big, broad smile on his face and I thought, ‘Oh that’s good. He must have remembered some Shakespeare quotes’,” Cullen said.

But he said “you won’t believe it mum – the poem you wrote about me came up in the paper”.

The poem, Envoi in Chalk, appeared in a Junior Cycle English exam – the Irish equivalent of GCSEs.

It was inspired by Cullen’s son Lee, after she spotted a message he had written in chalk on a pavement when he was eight years old.

Recalling the moment she learned the poem had appeared on the exam paper, Cullen – the Meskell Poet in Residence at the University of Limerick – said she could scarcely believe it.

“It was just the most flabbergasting moment. I kind of thought it felt like I was in another dimension,” she told BBC News NI.

“A lot of things went through my head. Is this really happening? My own 15-year-old son answering a question on a poem that I’ve written?”

She said she and Lee hugged before she phoned relatives to share the news.

“I got quite emotional about it, as you would, and my breath was taken away, really. I was just kind of in a state of pleasant shock,” she said.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime synchronicity.”

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More: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4gd2eyvp1o