Local poet regales audience at official opening of Esker Arts Centre in Tullamore

Poet Cormac Lally was one of the performers at Tuesday's June 6, official opening by President Michael D Higgins of Esker Arts Centre.

Cormac is originally from Tullamore and is one of Ireland's top spoken word artists.

His work has been featured on national radio and television and he is a familiar face at the country's top festivals. He has performed with numerous other well established artists.

His presence was extremely well received by the packed auditorium last Tuesday. Having made the audience laugh with his remarks about the appropriateness of the name ''Esker'' for the centre and referring to the time frame between the concept and last Tuesday's official opening, Cormac commented.''this project started quite a while ago and it was a very slow moving beast. So I think it's a beautiful artistic irony that it's named after a glacier.''

Cormac's work has been described as a''mix of utter lies, hard truths, politics and family life, dropped on the listener with a cutting humour with deep emotional levels, delivered in a flowing rhythm.''

At the opening ceremony he spoke about Tullamore and how when he was young he thought he would never get away from the town as he felt there was nothing in it. Yet when he had travelled extensively, reminders of home were everywhere in the people he met.

In the end he found what he had been looking for all along in his home town.

He wrote and spoke the following poem about his travels and the connections to home.

Tullamore

I walk out of my front door, and the footpath’s my environ

Hard concrete, conceals cobbled streets, that sang in horseshoe iron

Where barefoot youths, learned barefaced truths, of famine and plantation

From sixteen Church Street, I stroll old beats, to find my inspiration

My earthly host, now trods on ghosts, of memories surprising

The phoenix ashes, violent clashes, the first shots of the rising

Colonial masters, aviation disasters, the empires fall and flight

Where Papal church, pitched souls that searched, for spiritual being, to fight

But Tullamore, she was a bore, to teenage I with school achieved

I knew it all, there’s no enthrall, in these town walls I believed

I journeyed East, to slay the beasts of wanderlust and cloister

I strode in haste anticipating tastes, of worldly flavoured oysters

Old Tullamore, she lay behind new shores, but escaping her proved hard

In rural France, I met a man by chance, that lived once in Ballard

In Rotterdam, well I’ll be damned, where industries regaled

My professional peers, those engineers, knew men from Arden Vale

In Dubrovnik's old town, it was there I found, Croatian fighting legends

In their archives, they owed their lives, to a warrior born in Screggan

I waded through marsh, through jungles harsh, in deepest darkest thailand

In tribal elder homes, I was regaled in tomes, of a Jesuit from Walsh Island

In New South Wales, my escape it paled, and withered, without cure

In the dry outback, on a miners track, there’s a road sign for Tullamore

So in the furthest place, bar outer space, I could travel on this earth

Could not conceal, nor suppress my feels, for the Big Hill of my birth

And when the ground, gave way I found, when brainstorm clouds had gathered

When I was lost, connections crossed, and oceans left me battered

The arms of family, meant more to me, than outlandish sought adventure

My community, and yes Joe Lee’s, in Ireland’s boggy centre

My uncles, aunts, my Mam and Dad, my brothers and my sister

Made my heart full, and the hometown pull, I could truly not resist her

So thank you D.E. Williams, for the industry that prospered

The Moores, the Hutton Burys, and the ethic that they fostered

Each master masons stone they placed, they built these walls that hold us

This is my hood, and it’s mainly good, and it will always, shape and mould us

It’s deep inside, the old Uibh Fhaile pride, and no vaccine has the cure

For once the phoenix lives, it’s fire forgives, and bests the worst cute hoor

This town gave me, a red haired cailin, my children and I’m grateful

An Tulach Mhor, mo chroi, mo stor, in the heartland of the Faithful.