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"If I forget thee, Jerusalem, / Let my blood be forgotten. / I shall touch your forehead, / Forget my own, / My voice change / For the second and last time / To the most terrible of voices -- / Or silence."

"Jerusalem is a see-saw; sometimes I dip down / into past generations and sometimes I rise skywards and then / yell like a child yelling, his legs swinging way up / I want to get off, Dad, I want to get off, Dad, help me off. / And that's how all the holy men ascend to heaven / like children shouting, Father I want to stay up here, / Father, don't get me down, our Father our King, / Leave us up here, our Father our King!"

"Jerusalem-the only city in the world, where the right to vote is granted even to the dead."

Jerusalem has always sparked conflicting impulses and emotions in those who call her home, no less so for the common man than for the city's poet laureate, the man who spent the decades of his life observing and recounting the stories of Jerusalem with an eye far keener than any journalist. Yehuda Amichai's Jerusalem springs fully realized from his verse, formed with tenderness, with awe, with skepticism and with a quietly slanted humor - a poetic creation, yet as familiar to anyone who has set foot in the city as sun-warmed Jerusalem stone.

Surprisingly for a man whose every couplet seems to expose another intrinsic truth about Jerusalem life, Yehuda Amichai was born far from the Holy City, in Würzburg, Bavaria in 1924. Raised in a strictly Orthodox Jewish family, Amichai was conversant in Hebrew at a young age, and his familiarity with the rhythms of religious Hebrew texts informed many of his poems - though unlike many of his forebears and contemporaries in Hebrew poetry, he tended to shy away from the sometimes-obscure literary register of the language, employing a more colloquial Hebrew colored with religious imagery in his verse.

Amichai was more fortunate than most of his generation: his family abandoned Germany for pre-Israel Palestine in 1935, part of the large aliyah of German Jews fleeing the Nazi Party's reach, sparing him from a direct confrontation with the horrors of the Holocaust (though something akin to a survivor's guilt seeped into some of his work). Landing in Petach Tikvah, Amichai moved to the city that would become his lifelong muse in 1936. His formative years were spent amidst the political and ethnic storm that was Mandatory Palestine, with conflicts between the British authorities, Jews and Arabs over the future of the region reaching a fever pitch by Amichai's late teens. Amichai joined the Haganah, the underground defense militia of the Mandatory Jewish community, in the early 1940s, volunteered with the British military during World War II, and served in the War of Independence that cemented Israel's statehood in 1948.

Amichai's career as a poet began soon afterward during his studies at the Hebrew University, and he published his first volume of verse in 1955. Accolades at home soon followed, and by the next decade, Amichai's poems began to appear in translation, rapturously received worldwide - despite their sometimes oblique Jewish context, and despite the loss of the poet's clever Hebrew wordplay (which he would go on to praise, arguing that each translated Amichai work has its own poetry of linguistic nuances unintended by the poet but no less valid), Amichai's philosophical musings, wry humor and sharp eye for the mundane details of daily existence won him a huge following in his lifetime. Wandering the alleyways of Yemin Moshe, where he lived since the 60s, or sitting in a quiet corner of downtown's landmark Tmol Shilshom literary cafe, where he often wrote and led workshops, Amichai was a man seen about town in Jerusalem.

And though he wrote about a wide array of subjects, idiosyncratic Jerusalem was the well to which he kept returning throughout his life. In perhaps his most-quoted paean to city life, Amichai explored the overlap of Jerusalem's ancient history with its contemporary vibrant population:

Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David's Tower. I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, "You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

Amichai died of lymphoma in 2000, depriving the city of one of its living legends - but the poet's influence is still strongly felt by any Jerusalemite who tried to capture the city on the page. And for a Jerusalem visitor, there can be no better way to become intimately acquainted with the city's spirit than picking a shaded spot and leafing through a volume of Amichai's poetry as Jerusalem's people go by, laden with fruits and vegetables for their families.