The World is Great : Ken Gibbs

EMILY CULLEN AND SON, LEE

In all my years of being a closet poet, my wife has only once thought that what I’d written was worthy of the word ‘poet’. All the rest were classified as ‘not worthy’. Somewhat ego-denting even when I thought I’d written quite a clever limerick:

“My wife with whom I sometimes quarrelel
“Says my poetry’s nothing but horribelel
“As I don’t use a limerick
“Which I think is ephemeric
“Preferring instead the simple form ‘doggerel’”

Ah, well, such is the burden of having married an English major of allegedly Irish extraction. Mark you, I got my own back on her because I write a rhyme or two for her birthday every year, usually received with a sigh. . . .

Then I read about an Irish poetess – Emily Cullen who is Meskell Poet in Residence at the University of Limerick in Galway, Ireland - who wrote something which she maintained wrote itself, about her own son, Lee.   

Cullen’s son was writing the Irish equivalent of the GCSE exams when he came home after writing ‘English’ as one of those exams, with a wide smile on his face. “Good”, thought his mother, “he must have had a question on Shakespeare where he can have used some appropriate quotes”. However, she was in for a surprise because her son said that there had been a question on a poem which she had written after she had seen what he – Lee - had written in chalk on the pavement some seven years previously which read, “The world is great”.

There can’t be too many instances where such a synchronicity can have occurred. Cullen had no idea that her poem had been included in the questions on the English paper – because she had not been informed. Apparently it is standard procedure NOT to inform someone whose work will appear in the exam until after the exam has been taken.

Her son, Lee, recognised the poem immediately and was tempted to answer the questions in the first person but realised that the examiner might not believe him, so answered in the third person. Probably a wise decision lest the examiner might have thought that he had somehow got early information on the paper. Well, he did get early information – some seven years earlier.

The original BBC report may be seen here.

Envoi in chalk by Emily Cullen

I’m calling my son from the end of the estate
when my eye snags on green pastel words.
He has chalked on the pavement:
The world is great
This is just the line I need to read,
my mother in hospital, my shoulder inflamed,
future employment uncertain,
Earth eyeballing Armageddon.
Yet how right, his perception.
He bolts up on his yellow scooter,
eight-year old fringe quiffed with gel,
on the cusp of the age of cool.