LA poet Amanda Gorman performs at the grand opening of Karen Bass

Los Angeles native Amanda Gorman performed an original poem at the inauguration of Mayor Karen Bass, echoing her January 2021 star turn as the youngest presidential inaugural poet in US history. .

Gorman, who turned 24 in March, appeared at the Microsoft Theater on Sunday, wowing the delighted crowd from a circular side stage.

His 3.5-minute recitation drew a standing ovation.

Dressed in a long pale pink dress and carefully enunciating every word, Gorman began her poem by asking, “What is the way forward when women have encountered many roadblocks instead of roads?”

She spoke of a “new dawn, brought into the open by a woman whose silence is broken” and the responsibility of bringing visibility to the most vulnerable.

“Let them say today that we wrote our own path, not with anger but with will. That always in this dark hour we spoke from our hearts to power,” Gorman said, nodding to a sense of great change and a sisterhood of united women.

“The time of the unheard of is officially over. For the world must learn this and learn it quickly. Even if we are the first, we are far from being the last. The way forward is not a road we take. The way forward is a road we walk,” Gorman said. “Here, a path that we are opening today, because where there is will, there are women. And where there are women, there is always a way.

In 2014, when she was 16, Gorman was named Los Angeles Young Poet Laureate before becoming the first national Young Poet Laureate in 2017.

Less than four years later, she won acclaim for her recitation of the original poem “The Hill We Climb” during President Biden’s inauguration.

This poem – which Gorman finished late on the night of January 6, 2021, after watching pro-Trump insurgents storm the US Capitol – captured the angst and hope of a nation “that is not not broken / but simply unfinished”.

The performance immediately turned her into a literary and media sensation – less than a month later she became the first female poet to take part in America’s most-watched sporting event, performing as part of the Super Bowl. LV.

Another young Los Angeles poet, Sophie Szew, also delivered a powerful performance earlier in the ceremony that built on the imagery of glass ceilings and Los Angeles as the city of angels.

“My generation was told to get up by their bootstraps, but women here before me wonder how we can get up by our bootstraps if we never have the resources to buy boots in the first place,” said Szew halfway. the recitation.

“Angels, today the blazing heat of hope melts the glass at our feet and helps shape it into boots for every angel to turn into art,” Szew said, “so that rather than living life thinking about what we wear on our feet, we think about what we wear on our heart.