Brian Routh's three short lines capture a small, strange moment of doubt. The speaker starts with a plain question: who am I? It is the kind of thought that can arrive suddenly, without any obvious cause. Then the speaker tries to answer it by remembering a "moment of recognition," some instant when they felt they truly saw or understood themselves.
The twist is in the last line: "I thought I knew." Those words undercut the memory. The speaker isn't sure the recognition was real, or whether it still holds. What once felt like solid self-knowledge now seems shaky, perhaps even mistaken.
The mood is quiet, uncertain and a little unsettled. There is no panic and no neat answer. The poem is so brief that it leaves the reader hanging in the same gap the speaker is in, stuck between what they believed and what they can no longer be sure of. The lack of punctuation adds to the drifting, thoughtful feel.