Suddenly, it's daybreak, and glottage opens up to us like a wound.

The bypass bears is on over broken terraces and boarded up temples, dead parks and lonely walkers.

When I was last in this city, I used to dream that my sacred river would rise up and drown

these streets. It almost looks as if I succeeded. There's no bomb damage that I can see. No signs of

direct bombardment this far south, and yet you can see

the war's ruin and the war's cost everywhere around us. You can see it in the disrepair

of the houses and the shop fronts, the exhausted and unhappy faces of passers-by who are walking a

little too fast and with a little too much urgency and in the noisy brass band confidence

of the billboard selling victory announcements and aluminium air raid shelters.

You can see it in closed-up stores and broken windows and in the absences too.

The quiet market streets that would once have been bustling, the unoccupied corners.

Loud speakers and placards over hanging checkpoints,

and guard posts bark out commands to empty squares,

about the new laws on gatherings of more than four persons, the harm caused

by statements or jokes that undermine the nation's confidence. Nobody is standing around long enough

to listen to any of this,

but we roll forwards past the remnants of the riots that must have caused this new wave of vigilance.

Broken bottles, stones, and blood on the tarmac.

Perhaps I was wrong to expect such a dramatic annihilation, wither tides and rivers rise.

Because after all, this is the only way that something as grand as a city or a nation or an empire can ever die.

Starving, slow and in terrible self-denial.

I look out and all I can think is that I no longer want to wreck this city.

...