Click here to view the video for Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb.”
President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris ostensibly were the main attractions on Inauguration Day. But Amanda Gorman stole the show with her reading of uplifting poem “The Hill We Climb,” becoming an overnight media and internet star.
The work by Gorman, 22, the youngest poet to read at a presidential inauguration, focused on themes of unity and hope amid the pandemic and the surreal political violence of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one,” reads one of her poem’s lines.
The 710-word “The Hill We Climb” poem took Gorman nearly six minutes to read. Within a few hours, a DJ at Seattle radio station KEXP had set the poem to music.
“It’s not often that you wake up on a morning feeling like this,” Gorman, said Thursday in a live interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The L.A. native acknowledged that she was nervous about her appearance: “I had not been expecting, at 22, that they would trust me with such an honor… I was honestly scared of writing such a poem. I wasn’t sure that I could even do it justice, but I’m so glad that I put my best foot forward and did it.”
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