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.