Halfway through it, she appeared to get nervous and quickly ducked behind the podium. She stood back up as people rushed from backstage to help her. “I just threw up on international television, and it feels great,” she said with a laugh, before reading the rest of her poem.

It ended: “Will you give up? Or is enough enough?”

When the speeches — along with performances by Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus and others — were finished, and the crowds began to disperse, the Stoneman Douglas students became tourists again, albeit ones who had moved thousands.

Amanda Lee, a 17-year-old junior who had been in one of the classrooms where shots were fired, left the rally with other students, pausing to snap pictures of the cherry blossoms that had started to bloom along the street.

Amanda said she had expected more of an actual march than speeches and a concert. But the magnitude of what they had accomplished in less than two months, she said, hit when she saw images of protests across the country and around the world.

“It sinks in,” she said. “And then you feel that you’ve done the impossible.”