Poem of the Week | June 22, 2026

Dion O’Reilly’s books include Limerence, finalist for The Floating Bridge John Pierce Competition for Washington State Poets; Sadness of the Apex Predator (Cornerstone Press 2024), and Ghost Dogs (Terrapin 2020). Her work appears in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and Rhino. Most recently, her work was chosen as one of the winners of the 17th Annual Narrative Poetry Prize. A podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, private workshop facilitator, and co-editor of En•Trance Journal, she splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington. 

“Schadenfreude” by Dion O’Reilly is our Poem of the Week.

***

Schadenfreude

We have a word for it or at least the Germans do
            the frisson
of delight when an ex-boyfriend gets ugly or his girlfriend
            looks like hell
or when Mean Sister sports a bad wig but how terrible
            how very terrible
when that same sister enjoyed watching me beaten and I too enjoyed
            the sight of her
stripped and screaming the web of bruises the pleasure on Mother’s face
            as she slashed with her favorite whip
what scares me most isn’t the 21st century
            box cars
to haul people away like trash it’s the pleasure
            on a leader’s face
the terrible tip of the chin the armored skin what fear
            does to a face
I was suspended in time it was almost a lyric moment when I watched
            her beaten
I can’t say I felt fearless I felt sheltered by shadow
            and what’s watching
this memed country-wide slash and burn
            doing to us all
what shame what terror to feel safe for now
            until we’re not
there’s another word from German freudenfreude
            which means pleasure
at someone else’s pleasure from freuden which means joy
            and freude
which means joy which is how it feels to make love and what it feels like
            when your kid
hits a home run and what it feels like when the elderly sit at the edge
            of a music hall
watching the beautiful slowdance      to hear the word
            its little heartbeat
freudenfreude freudenfreude freudenfreude its taptaptap
            to the heart
like a stone about to shatter.

***

This poem began with my discomfort at discovering we have a word for gaining pleasure through another’s pain. I started thinking about how cruelty is contagious — how a sadist at the helm of a family or  country causes frightened members to feel safe only at the expense of others. I recognized that dynamic in my own history. 

 What disturbed me most in writing “Schadenfreude” was the recognition that evil cannot be understood without acknowledging it as a human capacity — one that lives, to varying degrees, in everyone, including oneself. That recognition is deeply uncomfortable. It is also, I think, the only honest place to begin. 

Researching schadenfreude, I found its coined opposite: freudenfreude — pleasure in another’s pleasure. The contrast clarified something. Schadenfreude is a closing off; its appetite grows and is never satisfied. Freudenfreude moves in the opposite direction — toward a shattering of the ego, porousness, and shared joy, what we might call social cohesion. One contracts the self, hardens and isolates. The other expands into compassion, connection, and peace.