The Day I Gave My Confirmation Talk—2004 by Sr. Lou Ella Hickman, OVISS
"Every past breathing into tomorrow. / I pray they learned what I did not know to say."
They have grown into their future since then. Becoming my past a dot of memory that returns with what I wish I could have told them with what I know now. That Sunday afternoon the day long rain had deluged everything. My car a small boat moving with a wake of water above the tires. I entered a classroom draped with a sullen I have to be here because my parents made me. I show a movie clip telling them that Confirmation is like this story. Whatever that story was. I wish I had told them they were my heroes living reminders of the White Rose martyrs, the young saints like the Little Flower declared a Doctor of the Church, the young inventors like Louis Braille. I wish I had told them if I were called to die for God, I would want to be like them. Willing. Unafraid to die. So sure with love. Their future still unfolds. And their children’s as well. Every past breathing into tomorrow. I pray they learned what I did not know to say.
Sr. Lou Ella Hickman is a widely published poet and a member of the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament of Corpus Christi, Texas. Her poetry collection she: robed and wordless was published in 2015 as a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection, an imprint of Press 53. Her second collection, Writing the Stars, was published in 2024 by Press 53.