I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through. Listen to this music

We traced this line directly to Daniel Ladinsky's *A Year with Hafiz* (2011, p. 3), where it appears verbatim as the opening of a longer piece ("I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through—listen to this music. I am the concert from the movement of every creature singing in myriad chords..."), and it also circulates from Ladinsky's earlier collection *The Gift* (1999). Ladinsky presents his work as renderings "by Hafiz," but his books are widely understood by specialists to be his own devotional compositions inspired by Hafez rather than literal translations of the Persian divan, and this line in particular has no counterpart in any standard critical edition of the *Divan-e Hafez*. The tell is internal: the explicit invocation of "Christ's breath" is a Christian frame alien to the 14th-century Islamic context in which the historical Hafez wrote, where the Beloved, God, or Khuda would be the reference point. Every published appearance we found — in works by Bulson, Edgar, Reiner, and Eckerman — either quotes it as a Hafiz saying or explicitly credits Ladinsky's rendering, and none point back to a genuine Hafez original. Because we can name the concrete competing origin — Ladinsky's modern English composition, published under his own hand and attributed to Hafiz by him rather than translated from Hafez — the credit to the historical poet does not hold. On the evidence available, we consider this quotation misattributed.