Birth-soils,
The sea-salts, scoured me, cortex and intestine,
To receive these remains.
As the incinerator, as the sun,
As the spider, I had a whole world in my hands.
Flowerlike, I loved nothing.
Dead and unborn are in God comfortable.
What a length of gut is growing and breathing –
This mute eater, biting through the mind's
Nursery floor, with eel and hyena and vulture,
With creepy-crawly and the root,
With the sea-worm. entering its birthright.
The stars make pietas. The owl announces its sanity.
The crow sleeps glutted and the stoat begins.
There are eye-guarded eggs in these hedgerows,
Hot haynests under the roots-in burrows.
This one line stanza is also open to interpretation. A  pieta  is a sculpture of a virgin and child. The owl, in popular imagination, is thought of as “wise” because of its wide-eyed beautiful appearance. 
 Hughes posits in this poem that nature should not be romanticised but rather accepted as brutally unsentimental. The owl is a nocturnal hunter and announces its sanity through hunting to survive. Night brings an unforgiving natural world, not just awe-inspiring starlight.
Mayday on Holderness