Twenty words are enough for smashyface to travel from a daydream of heroism to a small, almost awkward request to be taken seriously. "Strong" seems to be about wanting power, but what it finally asks for is not power over anything. It asks for a way to be useful. The poem gives no circumstances for its speaker, so the best way to read it is as the voice it builds for itself, line by line.
The opening line is plain and conversational: "I wish I could be strong." Its six syllables fall almost into a steady beat, with the stress landing on "wish" and "strong," the longing and the thing longed for. The verbs matter as much as the nouns. "Wish" and "could" place strength out of reach, so the speaker never claims it and only imagines it.
Then comes the poem's one real image, and it is the longest line: "The final pillar towering above ruins." Eleven syllables stretch upward the way the pillar does, and then the line lands on "ruins," dragging the eye down to rubble. The word "final" deserves a pause. A last pillar standing is a heroic picture, but also a bleak one, because for it to be last, everything around it must have fallen. The fantasy of strength carries a hidden cost, since this kind of strength is lonely. It is the strength of the one who is left, and the image suggests a wish to be so needed that nothing else is required.
Line three turns sharply: "Protect, not be protected." The line has no subject, and the "I" of the first line drops out, as if the speaker dissolves into a function. It is also a neat grammatical mirror. The root word is the same on both sides of the comma, and only the passive ending changes who acts and who receives. The hard p sounds of "pillar," "protect," and "protected" tie the image to the wish, since the pillar is protection made visible. The line also hints, without saying why, that the speaker is used to standing on the protected side. Being looked after is made to sound like a kind of weakness.
The final line is the shortest, at four syllables: "I can help too." After the towering pillar, the drop in scale is deliberate. "Could" has become "can," so the wish has turned into a claim. "Help" is a humbler word than "protect," and "too" does a lot of quiet work. It means "also," which lowers the ambition from being the last pillar to being one of many, and it lets other people back into a picture that line two had emptied. But "too" can also sound like a plea, as in "let me also." The poem leaves both readings open. There is no full stop either, so the sentence ends without closing.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, and the line lengths swing from six syllables to eleven to seven to four. That irregularity suits the movement from grand fantasy to plain statement. There is a faint sound-echo, though not a true rhyme, between "ruins" and "too," whose long vowels are close. It links the wreckage of line two to the modest offer of line four, as if help were the natural answer to ruin. The poem is also framed by the pronoun "I," which opens the first line and the last. The speaker starts by wishing and ends by asserting.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it corrects itself. It lets the dramatic idea of strength have its moment, with the pillar, the ruins, and the lone survivor, and then it quietly replaces it with something truer and more modest. The single-word title promises a poem about strength, but the ending is really about wanting to count and to contribute. That feeling will be familiar to anyone who has been told to stay back and be looked after when they wanted to take part. The poem says it in twenty words, without self-pity and without overstating its case.