Claire Vogel Camargo — Touchstone Award for Individual Poems — Winner 2025
Claire Vogel Camargo is the recipient of a Touchstone Award for Individual Poems for 2025, for the poem:
secrets she did not mean to keep the war
— Claire Vogel Camargo, whiptail: journal of the single-line poem, Issue 13, June 2025.
Commentary from the Panel:
Secrets create a life often lasting longer than the duration of the secret. Secrets protect and lend power, but they also isolate. The unseen life of calculating the secrets necessary to survive a war surface in this poem, but also underneath the war, there is the stratum of what it means to be human.
When a poem starts, “secrets she,” it drills into an ancient western narrative of forbidden fruit and hidden selves. The deflections and the blame in the story of a lost Eden suggest the warring elements of human experience. To move from “secrets she” straight into a denial, possibly representing many betrayals by means of “secrets she did not mean to keep,” betrays the ache of all the ways humans can be misunderstood and how deeply we wish to mend our mortal battles.
This poem deftly suggests the uncontrollable nature of war. Given humanity’s penchant for violence, “war” has long been a season word in the world of haiku, and this poem echoes a current moral morass as old as the battle between dominance and non-dominance. In one interpretation, “she” is a combatant and has no doubt some kind of “Sophie’s Choice,” dilemma here. So much is suggested in such a novel way.
One’s reading of this poem could pivot in multiple places, offering both compression and a layered effect. Those with experience of war and care for refugees can visualize the weight of war on a woman’s spirit. Not only does this poem speak of secrets that cannot be divulged, the secrets also point to how “she” didn’t mean to keep the war so close to heart and mind. Was she a victim, a perpetrator? Both? How might war’s trauma express a battle inside her body? Was the war an external combat or an internal struggle? The poem isn’t saying. It has said enough.
Touchstone winners receive a crystal award to commemorate their selection. See the complete list of winners of both Individual Poem Awards and Distinguished Books Awards in the Touchstone Archives.
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Congratulations to Claire! In addition to the multiple reads depending on where the reader places the cut, I love how this does not need to regard a literal war. This poem works also as an experience of a family rift or a personal, even internal, conflict. It reminds me of my grandmother and the illness we did not know about until after she was gone.
secrets / she did not mean to keep the war
secrets she did not mean to keep / the war
Taking these two reads together, I see a correlation between keeping a secret and keeping a war. There is a pivot between these two reads, a moment of realization about the two sides of this deep (internal or interpersonal) truth.
The poem can work on many levels, which speaks to the poem’s power. Gratitude to the panel for making this thoughtful and nuanced choice.
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secrets she did not mean to keep the war
— Claire Vogel Camargo
whiptail: journal of the single-line poem, Issue 13, June 2025
Out of the many ways we can approach and write single-line haiku, it’s fun and engaging to start seeing or creating versions of how to read them from the straight-through all one statement method, to bonus readings:
secrets // she did not mean to keep the war
secrets she did not mean to keep // the war
secrets she did not mean to // keep the war
etc…
Subtle soft sounds from “secrets she” and “secrets she did” to one hard word [not] back to soft sounding [mean to] then hard-sounding ‘keep’ to soft though deadly “the war”:
secrets she did [not] mean to [keep] the war
The soft and hard sounding, the repeat via assonance of the ‘e’ sound and that final WAR both a soft and a harsh word, and crime against women (and children) as first targets. I met many women who were children when the Nazi warplanes flew low to personally and officially strafe them in Hull (North of England). So close you could defiantly put two fingers up at them.
Regarding the female species, it does seem as if the ‘other’ species has cruelly been at war with women from girl-child onwards, never letting up.
Countless books both non-fiction and as novels have been created to address this most vilest of anomalies of the human race:
Rose Madder by Stephen King: Focuses on a woman escaping a violent husband.
If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha: Follows women navigating intense social pressure and misogyny in South Korea.
The Foundling by Ann Leary: A novel set in the 1900s exploring the exploitation of women in institutional settings.
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty: Explores domestic violence hidden behind a facade of a happy life.
Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker: Examines the long-term psychological damage of abuse.
Don’t You Know I Love You by Laura Bogart: A family drama navigating a cycle of domestic violence.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Classic literature showing a woman’s loss of autonomy and self.
We now know it was mostly women who helped win WWII, for instance, without shouting, just sheer determination and bravery only a mother could bring.
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Top non-fiction accounts of women winning WWII include:
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This is a tiny tiny tiny number of books covering just a tiny number of women who resisted fascism and its cousins of hateful evil actors.
“D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II” by Sarah Rose:
Explores the lives of female agents recruited by the SOE who operated behind enemy lines.
“Code Girls: The True Story of the American Women Who Secretly Broke Codes in World War II” by Liza Mundy:
Details the thousands of American women who worked in intelligence, cracking enemy codes, which significantly shortened the war.
“The Last Secret Agent: The Extraordinary Story of a WW2 Spy in Her Own Words” by Phyllis “Pippa” Latour:
Chronicles the experiences of one of the last surviving SOE agents who parachuted into France and used knitting to conceal codes.
“A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II” by Sonia Purnell:
Tells the story of Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite and spy who was considered “most dangerous” by the Gestapo and helped ignite the French Resistance.
“The Women Behind the Few” by Sarah-Louise Miller:
Highlights the contributions of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in British military intelligence and their critical roles in the RAF’s air defence.
“Women Heroes of World War II: 32 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance, and Rescue” by Kathryn J. Atwood:
Offers a collection of stories about women from various nations who engaged in dangerous work and resistance.
https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=24501
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Here are some of the most prominent “unknown” or formerly unsung women who fought in WWII:
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Susan Travers (France): The only woman to serve officially in the French Foreign Legion.
Initially an ambulance driver, she became a driver for a Free French colonel and, during a siege in Libya, drove the lead vehicle through German lines to break out of a blockade, with her car riddled with bullet holes.
Virginia Hall (USA/UK): Considered one of the most consequential field operatives of the war, she was an Allied spy with a prosthetic leg (nicknamed “The Limping Lady”) who operated behind enemy lines in France for the SOE and OSS. She organized resistance, rescued agents, and escaped over the Pyrenees to avoid the Gestapo.
Nancy Wake (New Zealand/Australia): Known as the “White Mouse” by the Gestapo, she was one of the most highly decorated Allied spies. She led a 7,000-member French Resistance maquis group, engaging in sabotage and combat, and once killed an SS sentry with her bare hands.
Noor Inayat Khan (UK): A pacifist of Indian descent who became a British secret agent and the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France. She was captured, severely tortured, and executed at Dachau, never breaking her silence.
Krystyna Skarbek (Poland): Also known as Christine Granville, she was a pioneering Polish Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent known for daring rescues of agents, including saving a fellow agent from execution hours before he was to be killed.
Freddie and Truus Oversteegen (Netherlands): Teenaged sisters in the Dutch resistance who, along with Hannie Schaft, assassinated Nazi officers, blew up military bridges, and smuggled Jewish children to safety.
Lilya Litvyak (Soviet Union): Known as the “White Lily of Stalingrad,” she was a Soviet fighter pilot who became the first woman to hold the title of ace, shooting down between 5 and 12 enemy aircraft on her own before being shot down in 1943.
Mariya Oktyabrskaya (Soviet Union): After her husband was killed, she bought a T-34 tank (named “Fighting Girlfriend”) with her own money and, after training, drove it in combat for the Red Army, fighting in 1943-1944.
Eileen Nearne (UK): A British agent parachuted into occupied France as a radio operator, who was eventually captured and tortured by the Gestapo but never gave up her cover story.
My own adoptive mother was a Batwoman, never got to find out what my biological mother did. I wonder how many women from so many wars right up to now, are keeping secrets that save lives, even saved us maybe?
secrets she did not mean to keep the war
— Claire Vogel Camargo
A very powerful haiku, except I wish there was no need for it, though with current war crimes committed against women/mothers, children/babies in Ukraine, and Iran, and so many other places, we will always need these poems both small and large.
Claire’s haiku will continue to resonate down the ages to come.