Three short lines, and the most important word in them is the one that explains the least: "it." Nebex opens with "Today I saw it," and the pronoun points at nothing. The reader has to wait a whole line to learn what was seen, and that small delay sets the tone. The poem works by holding back, and what it finally gives us is stranger than what we were braced for.
What it gives us is "the angel from my nightmare." An angel is usually a figure of comfort, a messenger or a protector. Placing it inside a nightmare turns that expectation upside down, so the word carries beauty and dread at once. The possessive matters too. This is not a nightmare, it is "my nightmare," and that suggests the angel was made by the speaker's own mind. Judging by the wording, the poem may be describing a meeting with something that should have stayed in sleep. The word "Today" supports this reading. It is a plain, daylight word, and it hints that the border between dream and waking life has given way.
The title, "Loss," makes a promise the poem keeps in an unexpected way. Most readers expect a loss to be of a person, a place or a time. The last line gives something more unsettling: "I have lost myself." Nothing outside the speaker has gone. What has gone is the speaker's sense of who they are. The poem never says why seeing the angel should cause this. One possible reading is that the angel is a kind of mirror, a double, or a hidden part of the self that the speaker was never meant to meet. That is an inference, and the text leaves it open.
The construction is tight. Counted by syllables, the lines run five, seven, five, the same pattern as a haiku, though Nebex gives us no season or landscape, only an inner event. There is no rhyme. The effect comes from proportion instead. The short first line is a quiet statement, and the longer middle line swells around the image of the angel and the nightmare. The final line drops back to five syllables and ends flatly. After the stretched second line, that brevity feels like a door closing.
Punctuation adds to this. The comma after "Today I saw it" leads us on, and the full stop after "nightmare" completes the sighting. The loss then gets its own separate sentence. The poem makes a cut between seeing and losing, as if there were no time for a transition. Sound helps as well. The long "i" keeps returning: "I," "my," "night," "I," "myself." The speaker's own words, and the nightmare's, are built from the same vowel. The self is everywhere in the sound of the poem even as it disappears from the meaning.
The grammar of the last line also repays a closer look. "Saw" is simple past, finished and over. "Have lost" is present perfect, which means the loss reaches into the present moment and is not done with. The reflexive "myself" creates a puzzle, because the one who loses and the thing lost are the same. If the self is gone, someone is still left to say so. Perhaps that leftover "I" is what remains when the self has been taken, a voice without its owner. The poem does not settle this, and the unsettled feeling is the point.
The poem matters for its restraint. It does not describe the angel, explain the nightmare or console the speaker. In seventeen syllables it shows that a huge emotional event, the collapse of identity, can be told without any ornament. Because so little is explained, readers must bring their own nightmares to fill the gaps. The poem ends with no comfort and no way back, and that bare, unfinished ending is why it lingers after such a quick read.