Revised Earthquake

Here's a slightly revised poem.

Earthquake, 4/4/10

This solid-seeming earth’s a mist, a rolling
sea of subatomic particles. It takes a day like this,
when tectonic plates sing out like struck bells,
to put us straight. What we know as solid isn’t—
a seething, shifting, undifferentiated mass.
Made of the same stuff as that old redwood,
we rise like bracket fungus, overnight
from the trunk of that old redwood, and all
the many cities that we build are made of air.
Perhaps geologists, in their spotless coats,
probing and measuring, looking so sure
in what they know, will any minute feel
the jolt, and fall down on their knees, afraid.