“Cynthia in the Snow” is about the childhood experience of joy—its primary image is that of a young Black girl enjoying snowfall. The poem strikes modern readers as touching on Black Joy, a contemporary term for the age-old concept of the importance of acknowledging the moments when Black people can celebrate, even while facing and fighting oppression. In the poem, Brooks’s speaker, a young Black girl named Cynthia, explores the happy surprise of catching snow falling before it merges with the mud of the road and turns into a mucky mess. Brooks creates a world where a young Black girl marvels at the beauty of the snow around her, imbuing it with quasi-magical powers as she imagines it laughing, and unselfconsciously making up sing-song rhymes about its seemingly willful movements as she calls its “twitter-flitters.”

Even though there is darkness at the edges of Cynthia’s experience: the snow is possibly laughing at her, or at least in a way that excludes her, and its whiteness adds an element of oppression and unreachable purity to Cynthia’s already race-conscious internal world, Brooks intentionally focuses on awe and wonder. The poem is intended for children, to create joy in them and to mirror their own experiences.