L.A. poet Amanda Gorman performs at Karen Bass’ inauguration

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

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

Her 3½-minute recitation drew a standing ovation.

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

She spoke of a “new dawn drawn into the open by woman whose silence is broken� and the responsibility to bring visibility to the most vulnerable.

“Let them say today we wrote our own path, not with wrath, but with will; That still in this dark hour, we spoke our hearts to power,� Gorman said, nodding to a sense of great change and a sisterhood of women standing together.

“The time of never before is officially past. For the world must learn this, and learn it fast. While we may be the first, we are far from the last. The way forward isn’t a road we take. The way forward is a road we make,� Gorman said. “Here — a path we cast forth today. For where there’s will, there’s women. And where there’s women there’s forever a way.�

In 2014, when she was 16, Gorman was named youth poet laureate of Los Angeles before becoming the first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017.

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

That poem — which Gorman finished late into the night on Jan. 6, 2021, after watching pro-Trump insurrectionists storm the U.S. Capitol — captured the anguish and hope of a nation “that isn’t broken / but simply unfinished.�

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

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

“My generation has been told to pick itself up by its bootstraps, but the women here before me question how we can pick ourselves up by our bootstraps if we are never given the resources to buy boots in the first place,� Szew intoned midway through the recitation.

“Angels, today the blazing warmth of hope melts the glass by our feet and helps us fashion it into bootstraps 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.�