The speaker and the people around them experience a riot only through television. "We only saw the images" sets up the distance: fire, broken glass and looted stores arrive as screen pictures, not lived events. The poem piles up violent comparisons, with violence that "cooked like steaming lava" and shops "picked like open closets," so the destruction feels both vivid and strangely unreal, as if it were a spectacle.
After the chaos comes confusion. People ask what went wrong and who is to blame, but nobody agrees. The "web" that winds around the city like a "silk robe" suggests that media coverage, or perhaps the tangle of competing explanations, wraps the event in something smooth and glossy that hides more than it explains.
The mood is shocked, uneasy and sorrowful. The ending, "we saw, we mourned," is short and flat, which makes it feel like a limited response. Watching and grieving seem to be all the viewers can do, and the poem leaves us wondering whether that is enough.