This is a very impressive poem, after its archaic style!

It's interesting all the same that Tom Sleigh ignored (willy-nilly) the salient feature of ancient Semitic poetry, which is parallelism. Without it, the real rhetoric of the poem is not just lost in translation, but is excluded from it beforehand.

Had he not ignored parallelism, this is about how the poem would have looked. It would help if I had the original text before me and I knew how to read it, but even in English I can see a semantic hierarchy in the words which reminds me of that of the Psalms. I can imagine this text being sung like a Psalm, after Suzanne Haik-Vantoura's method.

So I think my reconstruction of the ancient verse and clause divisions (which were not always marked, especially in very old texts) is very close to the original. (I have not attempted to group the verses into semantic or melopoetic units.)

Like modern bronze and iron,
shed blood pools.

Our country’s dead melt into the earth
as grease melts in the sun,
men whose helmets now lie scattered,
men annihilated by the double-bladed axe.

Heavy, beyond help,
they lie still as a gazelle exhausted in a trap,
muzzle in the dust.

In home after home,
empty doorways frame
the absence of mothers and fathers
who vanished in the flames,

remorselessly spreading,
claiming even frightened children
who lay quiet in their mothers’ arms,

now borne into oblivion,
like swimmers swept out to sea
by the surging current.

May the great barred gate of blackest night
again swing shut on silent hinges.

Destroyed in its turn,
may this disaster too be torn out of mind.

wr ()()